Use the calendar utility to customize handling of dates for aging data and scheduling process requests. The Calendar Editor allows you to create and maintain calendars that provide general specifications, special types of dates (for example, holidays, workdays, and weekends), and business rules to apply to those special types of dates.
Calendars are stored in the Optim™ directory. The dates and rules in a calendar facilitate the semantic aging of data and adjust the day a scheduled process request is executed, as required. For details on scheduling process requests, see Schedule.
You can use the principles of semantic aging to advance dates relative to one another and in accordance with business rules. Semantic aging adjusts dates to occur on valid business days. For example, you might use linear aging to increment all dates by three months. In many instances, linear aging is sufficient, even though the resulting date might occur on a weekend day or a holiday. (For example, aging September 25th by three months yields December 25th, a standard holiday.) If required (for example, to test an application that requires a valid business date), however, you can use semantic aging to adjust weekend and holiday results to valid business days.
To provide semantic aging, use the Calendar Editor to define special calendar dates and rules to apply to the data you want to age. Once defined, you can use a calendar with the age function in a column map or the global specifications in a convert, insert, or load request to perform semantic aging.
The fully qualified name of a calendar consists of a 1 to 12 character string. When you create multiple calendars, it is helpful to use a logical set of naming conventions to identify the use for each and to organize calendars for easy selection.
This section explains how to create and maintain calendars including how to: