Can anyone tell me the best way of calculating the end date of a recurring event from the number of occurrences and the pattern in which the event occurs.
For example: I have an event which has start date as 10/07/2014 (Tuesday) and occurs every week on Tuesday. This event will end after 10 occurrences (say). So, the my method should return me the end date as : 12/09/2014
The method should also consider more complex situations like suppose if the event occurs yearly on first Monday of October and has total 10 occurrences.
(This isn't an answer which gives you a complete solution by any means, but hopefully it's a step in the right direction.)
Good luck. I've worked on an ActiveSync implementation, and recurrent events are fundamentally painful. You'll need to think about all kinds of corner cases - if something occurs every month on the 30th, what happens in February? What happens if it happens at 1.30am, and the clocks go forward or backward in the event's time zone so that 1.30am happens 0 or 2 times for a particular day?
Noda Time can help with this, but it doesn't provide a complete solution, partly because all the requirements will vary so much.
The important types you'll need to know about are LocalDate
and LocalDateTime
to provide time-zone-neutral dates/times, and Period
which represents a not-necessarily-fixed period of time, such as "1 month". That will help with things like "add a week" - and there are methods on LocalDate
for things like "next Monday after this date". It gets harder for events which are "weekly, on Monday and Wednesday" - you'll want to step through the weeks, working out which days occur within a particular week, until you've gone through all the events you need.
Noda Time 2.0 has the concept of "adjusters" which will make life somewhat simpler for things like "the first Monday of October" but everything you need to do can be done with Noda Time 1.3. (Don't wait for Noda Time 2.0, which I wouldn't expect to be released for another 6 months at least.)
I think my strongest pieces of advice would be:
x + 1 month + 1 month
isn't the same as x + 2 months
See more on this question at Stackoverflow