Calendars

Use the Calendar Utility to customize handling of dates for aging data and scheduling process requests. The Calendar Editor allows you to create and maintain Calendars that contain general specifications, special types of dates (for example, holidays, workdays, and weekends), and business rules to apply to those special types of dates.

Calendars are stored in the Optim™ Directory. The dates and rules in a Calendar facilitate the semantic aging of data and adjust the day a scheduled process request is executed, as required. For details on scheduling process requests, see Schedule.

Semantic Aging

Optim uses the principles of Semantic Aging to advance dates relative to one another and in accordance with business rules. Semantic Aging adjusts dates to occur on valid business days. For example, you can increment all dates by three months. For many dates, this is sufficient. However, incrementing a date may result in a weekend day or a holiday. (Aging September 25th by three months yields December 25th, a standard holiday.) These weekend and holiday results must be adjusted to valid business days. This adjustment, known as semantic aging, is critical. Without it, the result is linear aging which cannot provide accurate test data in all cases.

To provide semantic aging, use the Calendar Editor to define special Calendar dates and rules to apply to the data you want to age. Once defined, you can use a Calendar with the Age Function in a Column Map or the global specifications in a process request (Convert, Insert or Load) to perform semantic aging.

Naming Conventions

The fully qualified name of a Calendar consists of a 1 to 12 character string. When you create Calendars, it is helpful to use a logical set of naming conventions to identify the use for each and to organize Calendars for easy access.

Contents

This section explains how to create and maintain Calendars including how to:

For details on using the Age Function in a Column Map, see Column Maps. For details on how to specify date aging for a process request, refer to Move User Manual and Archive User Manual .