Subject: RE: Why is there no week of month facility in policyTimePeriodCon ditionAuxClass?

From: "David Lowndes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 14:52:54 -0000

> This sounds like a potentially ambiguous specification.  That is, how
would one
go about defining, in a general way, what consititutes the "first week of
the
month",  which would yield a specific set of days, for any given month?

For example, for this coming month, March 2000, what is "the first week of
the
month"?
1. Wednesday, March 1, through Saturday, March 4?
2. Sunday March 5, through Saturday, March 11?
<

You're right Ed, this is ambiguous and on reflection my point wasn't well
thought out - I don't know if it's any better now either!

Rather than specify the whole week, our actual requirement may be more like:

        The (1'st/2'nd/3'rd,4'th/5'th/last/next to last)
(M/T/W/T/F/Sat/Sun/Weekday/Weekend day/Day) of a month.

For example:

	The 1'st Monday of a month, or,
	The last Friday of a month.

I think these are achievable in the standard by:

	Setting the first 7 days in the ptpConditionDayOfMonth flags and the
Monday flag in ptpConditionDayOfWeek
	Setting the last 7 days in the ptpConditionDayOfMonth flags and the
Friday flag in ptpConditionDayOfWeek
	(I'm assuming here that the intention is to logically AND all the
attributes).

However, the requirement to say something like:

	The 2'st Weekday of a month

is in itself ambiguous as it could be interpreted as being the day after the
first weekday of a month, or (as in a weekly context) as the first weekday
in the second week of a month.

More clearly understandable may be the business case for:

	The first weekday of a month

I think this would entail an evaluation such as:

	((day = Monday) AND (monthdate <=3)) OR ((Tuesday <= day <= Friday)
AND (monthdate = 1))

Is there any way of expressing and evaluating this using the standard
attributes?

Dave Lowndes