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Creating a Business Calendar in WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1.2

Recently I had bogged about the Business Calendar’s in WID 6.1.2. Today I will be explaining how to create a Business Calendar in WID 6.1.2. Business Calendars are a new feature introduced in WID 6.1.2.

Following are the steps required in creating a Business Calendar.

1. Right click on the module and click on New -> Business Calendar.

2. Enter a name and other details for the business calendar.

3. Our calander window will be opened up.

4. I am going to design a business calendar that works on every week Monday to Friday 9-6 with Dec 25 as the holiday. To design this calendar, click on any examples present. We can define our business calendar using examples or manually. There is no difference between these two approaches except in example based design some data is pre populated. Here I am going with the example based design. So click on the first example itself. For me the first example is ‘January 1 2010′. After modifying the example my calendar looks like the following image which defines my office hours. Every week Monday to Friday 9 AM to 6 PM.

To add a holiday or an exception to this office hours click on Add Exception.

The above exception adds an exception so that Dec 25 will be a non working day.

Today I want to introduce an exciting new feature of WID 6.1.2 that I came across while reading a developer works article http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0807_fasbinder1/0807_fasbinder.html?S_TACT=105AGX01&S_CMP=HP&ca=drs- .

In WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1.2 we have the option to create a business calendar which is very crucial when we deal with human tasks. I haven’t upgraded to WID 6.1.2 yet. However looking into the pictures in that article it looks really great. It was a feature that was really missing in the earlier versions of WID.

In my current project we had a requirement to set up an escalation after 8 business hours. When we calculate the business hours we had to exclude Saturdays, Sundays and any other holidays in US. Also our escalation time should not include anything other than the normal business hours. For us we ended up in writing our own business calendar to meet our requirements.

I am wondering how IBM can miss such an important feature in earlier versions of WID. Anyways thanks IBM for adding it now.

I did not see WID 6.1.2 yet, so I am wondering is there any way to set up a time zone also for different tasks or users. This is extremely important when the business works on different geographies and time zones. If it is not already there, that is something IBM should consider in the coming versions.

Also is there any way to modify the calendar without a deployment something like a Business Rule Manager? I feel WPS should have something like that as its does not make any sense for a new deployment just because a new unexpected holiday is coming or we missed to count a holiday at the time of deployment. Let the business users manage the holidays and business timings. Yeah?

Also I feel a date picker for setting the time/date values in WID will be a good addition.

Let me upgrade to the newer version and see what the other new exciting features in WID are.

Edit: Upgraded to WID 6.1.2. A new tutorial on creating business calendar has been added.