Itinerary

Lazy time scheduling toolset for .NET

spoulson
28
7
C#

Itinerary: Lazy time scheduling toolset for .NET

Release 1.1, 2015-05-05
GitHub repo: https://github.com/spoulson/Itinerary
Shawn Poulson, http://explodingcoder.com

INTRODUCTION

What does Itinerary do?

  • Describe an abstract schedule of timed events as an expression, such as the equivalent of:
    “Every Friday at 5:30 pm for 1 hour, except on holidays”, for any given time range.
  • Parse expressions to an Itinerary ISchedule object at runtime.
  • ISchedule provides IEnumerable of timed events within any given time range.
  • Perform complex boolean set math on schedules.
  • Change ISchedule properties programmatically, then reserialize back to TDL expression string.

What doesn’t Itinerary do?

  • Does not actively run tasks on a schedule. That’s your job.
    For that, check out Quartz.NET and the provided ScheduleTests unit test class.
  • Does not perform timezone interpretation or computation. All date/times are timezone agnostic.

Why use Itinerary?

  • Lightweight, stateless, lazily generate events on demand.
  • You need to integrate a cron-like scheduler into your app.
  • You already use a scheduler, like Quartz.NET, but need more powerful scheduling logic.
  • You need to logically describe arbitrary or complex recurrance patterns.
  • You need to forecast scheduled timed events.
  • You need to store the recurrance logic (not the events) for later reuse.

How do I get started using Itinerary?

  • Learn TDL expression syntax from the Itinerary Wiki on GitHub:
    https://github.com/spoulson/Itinerary/wiki
  • Test TDL expression syntax using the TDL Explorer tool in the solution.
  • Check out the example projects.
  • Refer to unit tests for usage reference.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Development requirements:

  • Visual Studio 2013 (Professional edition or better required for unit test execution).
  • NUnit to run unit tests. Typically, Visual Studio 2013 Professional + NUnit Test Adapter extension will do the job.
  • Java SE JDK (optional, required to recompile ANTLR grammar).

Runtime requirements:

  • .NET 4.5.1 Framework.

KNOWN ISSUES

None reported at time of release.
See GitHub repo for issue tracking.

LICENSING

Itinerary is an open source project licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode.

ANTLR 3.2 http://antlr.org binary tools and .NET runtime are included in the Expl.Itinerary.Parser
project, allowable under ANTLR’s BSD license terms: http://antlr.org/license.html.