Use with datetimes?

[rmosolgo]

Oh hi :)

I'm trying to use this gem with repeating events that happen at certain times of day, for example:

• Union:
  • Every Tuesday from 7pm to 8:30pm
  • Every Thursday from 6:30pm to 8pm

In that case, applying times to the output of this gem is straightforward: if it's a Tuesday, it's 7-8:30, and if it's a Thursday, it's 6:30-8. But in some cases, it's a bit harder:

• Union:
  • Every first and third Tuesday from 5pm to 6:30pm
  • Every Tuesday from 7pm to 8:30pm
  • Exact date: mm-dd-yyyy (imagine it's a specific first Tuesday) from 3:30pm to 5pm

Now, given a stream of dates, it's a bit harder to match them with times from my own data. I'd have to reimplement a bit of recursion logic to check which Tuesdays are which.

Are you interested in supporting this use case? I can imagine a few things that might work for me (although I didn't read the paper, so forgive me if I'm going off the rails) :

• Accept starts-at and ends-at times along with various expression, then return Occurrence objects instead of Dates. (Occurrence could duck-type like a Date, which would minimize the impact on current users.)

  {
    weekday_in_month: {
      weekday: 2, 
      count: 1, 
      start_time: [17, 00], # [hours, minutes] ? Or some other object here?
      end_time: [18, 30], 
  }
  # ...
  schedule.next_occurrence # => #<Occurrence @starts_at=#<DateTime ...> @ends_at=#<DateTime ...> >
  

• Accept user-defined metadata with expressions, and include that metadata along with occurrence results

  {
    weekday_in_month: {
      weekday: 2, 
      count: 1, 
      metadata: my_application_object,
    }
  }
  # ...
  schedule.next_occurrence # => #<Occurrence @date=#<Date ...>, @metadata=my_application_object >
  

Perhaps there are other ways to support this use case?

If you're interested in supporting it, I'd be happy to take a crack at some approach that seems good to you, Thanks!