Specify rules for different time intervals than weekly

[jschirrmacher]

If I want to express a policy / rule, that, for example, parking is prohibited every 3rd Wednesday each month (because there might be a market, for example), how could that be done?

Another example would be to prohibit parking on the 15th of each month.

The current spec allow to define a weekday and a time interval, which doesn't allow these cases.

Impacted Spec

• policy

[marie-x]

In cases like these, you would write individual Policy items for each day that is affected. For a monthly event, you could cover a year in advance with twelve Policies. Or if you prefer to have only one related Policy at a time, each month you would obsolete the prior Policy for the 15th of this month with the 15th of next month. It is more verbose than a single Policy, but it means that we are not adding the complexities of a full calendar application. You can also put a human-readable description in the description field.

The ability to express such nuance as a Policy author can be embodied in an editor application which hides the JSON details from the user. I believe Ride Report has one, and others are in development.

[schnuerle]

So this is currently possible with Policy. Does it need an implementation example in the spec? Or does the spec need to change to make this clearer/easier? Now would be a good time for either as we are working on Policy changes for MDS 2.0.

[jschirrmacher]

Thanks for the answer, @marie-x, and your question, @schnuerle. In fact, a clarification in the spec could help to understand how to handle those cases. An actual example could be a little too verbose due to the number of policies needed.

But wouldn't a new version of the spec be a good time for adding some more fields to make this easier? I can imagine to add a kind of 'multiplier', so that one could make the rule repeat all, for example, 2 weeks. This would not quite cover my example from the first post, but would handle at least those cases when an event occurs in a regular interval. If we would add a selection for 'day', 'week' and 'month', it would be possible to define 'every 3rd Wednesday', which is quite near to my initial question.