I'm trying to get Dialogflow to report sales in different time periods. When I ask things like
what's the sale last month
what's the sale in march 2011
They work fine. However, if I didn't specify "last" or year, Dialogflow always think I'm asking about the upcoming period (which I guess works great for restaurant booking, etc.). For example, "what was our sale in april" would guess that I mean April of next year.
Should I write a fulfillment to deal with this or is there a way to specify only historical periods only?
Another related question is it has trouble understanding notations like 2010q1 or q2/2015 which is quite common in economics and finance. "q1/2000" would extract only q1 (correctly, but with the upcoming q1). "2000q1" wouldn't be recognized at all.
Thanks!
Related
For example, Foo Holiday is the 3rd Tuesday in March. Bar Holiday is the 7th minute of the 7th hour of the 7th day of the 7th Month.
I have looked at standards like ISO8601 but it seems those are more concerned with explicit points in time.
As AlexApps99 described in their answer,
there is no standard that will cover all holidays.
For example, the start of Ramadan often depends on physically sighting the new moon, so it's impossible to predict the exact date, as cloudy weather might prevent anybody from spotting it in your country for a few days.
However, for many repeating events the follow simpler rules (e.g. Foo & Bar Holiday in your question), there is
iCalendar's RRULE (Recurrence Rule),
which is a standard for creating repeating patterns for recurring events.
Many calendar apps will have a GUI for creating RRULE.
RRULE is documented in
RFC 5545 Section 3.8.5.3.
For example, an event for U.S. Presidential Election day would be:
Every 4 years, the first Tuesday after a Monday in November, forever (U.S. Presidential Election day):
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:19961105T090000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=4;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=TU;BYMONTHDAY=2,3,4,5,6,7,8
Example taken from RFC 5545 Section 3.8.5.3 Page 129
Foo Holiday (3rd Tuesday in March) could be described with:
RRULE;FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=TU;BYMONTHDAY=15,16,17,18,19,20,21
Bar Holiday could be described with (7th minute of the 7th hour of the 7th day of the 7th Month) could be described with:
RRULE;FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=7;BYMONTHDAY==7;BYHOUR=7;BYMINUTE=7
Unfortunately, the iCalendar RRULE spec can't can't handle more complicated rules.
Easter can't be done, (although https://github.com/sappjw/calendars contains Easter RRULEs accurate for
1900-2099, and the Python dateutil library's RRULE has an unofficial extension called BYEASTER, but even then, it only supports Western Easter).
Non-Gregorian calendars are also not supported, however, there is a
draft spec RFC7529 that adds
RRULE support for additional calendars, which would allow you to describe
Chinese New Year using the following syntax:
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20130210
RRULE:RSCALE=CHINESE;FREQ=YEARLY
SUMMARY:Chinese New Year
These define a recurring event for the Chinese New Year, with the
first instance being the one in Gregorian year 2013.
Example taken from RFC7529#Section 4.3.1
There's no standard way to represent holidays, because holidays are pretty hard to keep track of. Each country has their own set of holidays, and there are different definitions for what is considered a holiday (public holidays, school holidays, religious holidays, international hotdog day etc).
On top of that, the days that holidays lie on is pretty hard to predict. Many holidays celebrating events on the non-Gregorian calendar, such as Easter, will be on a different date each year, and others based on external events can be unpredictable into the future.
Many holidays are not just "days", but a range multiple days, or specific hours of a day, and you can't forget that these intervals have timezones attached too (and will be different in different countries)
With all this complexity, you'll need to create your own way to represent these holidays, probably ignoring some of the complexity you don't need to handle.
If you're sharing this data, a standard format such as iCalendar would be ideal, and you could store custom properties of the holidays in extension fields (starting with X-).
If you're just storing this data internally, you're better off making your own structure to store whatever you need, perhaps using ISO8601 to store the intervals.
has anyone ever implemented a holiday calendar in kdb?
it's pretty easy to exclude weekends or to create a function to get nextweekday or previous weekday, but what if you want to also take into account public holidays / bank holidays?
What have people done in order to account for this?
A rudimentary way is to create a file with known bank holidays across LDN & NY let's say - but is there a more automated way?
You may want to take a look at holiday.q on Github. Note that NYSE rules change from time to time so you may need to make some adjustments to bring that code up to date.
Most places will have purchased some form of calendar data product (.e.g Copp Clark). From that you'd build a suite of functions for getPrevBizDay etc, and you'd do it for all regions. It will also have future holidays.
Alternatively I'm sure there are some open source holiday data downloads you could scrape from the web and from them you could manually put together a table (perhaps it would be an annual once-off process to update it for the next year).
We are trying to encourage our team to document more (yes, it's like getting children to eat their vegetables).
Our plan is to have a monthly leaderboard of users in our space, by Edits and Comments (we don't want to count labels or likes). After about a day of messing around with widgets and such, we have come up with the Contributors Summary, but there is no date range for that. It's for all time. We need the exact same data, but for the past month.
Is there a macro/widget/etc that gives similar stats as the Contributors Summary, but can be restricted to a date range, i.e. -30d to present? Or perhaps a hidden parameter we can provide in the URL?
Problem
Some reoccurring events, that don't really end at some point (like club meetings?), depend on other conditions (like holiday season). However, manually adding these exceptions would be necessary every year, as the dates might differ.
Research
I have found out about exdate (see the image of "iCalendar components and their properties" on Wikipedia (2))
Also found some possible workaround: 'just writing a script to do process such events'. This would still mean I need to process a .ics manually and import it into my calendar, which implies some limitations:
can not be determined for all time spans (e.g. holidays not fixed for more than three years)
these events would probably be separate and not reoccurring/'grouped', which makes further edits harder
Question
Is there a way to specify recurring exceptions in iCal ?
To clarify, I have a recurring event and recurring exceptions.
So for instance I have a infinitely reoccurring weekly event, that depends on the month; where it might only take place if it's not e.g. January, August, or December.
Is there a way to use another event (/calendar) to filter events by boolean logic ?
If one could use a second event (or several) to plug into exdate this would solve the first problem and add some more possibilities.
note
if this question is too specific and the original problem could be solved by other means (other calendar-formats), feel free to comment/edit/answer
RFC2445 defines an EXRULE (exception rule) property. You can use that in addition to the RRULE to define recurring exceptions.
However, RFC2445 was superseded by RFC5545, which unfortunately deprecates the EXRULE property. So, client support is questionable.
As you already proposed, automatically adding EXDATE properties is a possible solution.
BYMONTH would be another possibility, e.g. here's a rule for a club meeting that occurs the first Wednesday of every month except December (which is their Christmas party, so no business meeting)
RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=1WE;BYMONTH=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11
When giving the option for something to reoccur every certain amount of time how should I treat times that don't reoccur on every interval?
For example what should happen to birthday reminders for February 29th? Or if I have a monthly appointment on the 31st what should happen on months that do not have a 31st day?
What do you believe the reasonable user would expect and be least surprised by?
My first reaction to this question would be to give the user the option of what to do if it falls on that date (go to next day, skip the day, etc.).
But to directly answer your question, I believe the reasonable user would be least surprised by the occurrence falling on the day before the "skipped" day.
I'd think you would be able to flag dates like this pretty easily. The only dates I can think of are the 29th, 30th, and 31st of a month, or February 29th.
When the user opts to be reminded of one of these dates monthly (or annually for Feb. 29), you can prompt them for an alternate date for those months.
Additionally, you could have an option to be notified "on the last day of each month."
Ideally, prompt when creating the reminder.
If you are stuck with it, I would pull them forward. That's the least harmful choice. You don't always want the least surprise, minimizing the harm of making the wrong choice is also important.