[concern-users] Handling "business days" in timeouts and other timings

[Andy D. <an...@ma...>]

I would like the ability to specify some of my timeouts in "business days".  
For example:

  <activity name="Review Entry" 
class="com.marathon.workflow.concern.MAsynchronousActivity" 
asynchronous="true" user="true" optional="false" timeout="86400">

timeout="86400" represents 24 hours (1 day), but if this activity is started 
at 4:00 PM on Friday, I'd like it to not timeout until 4:00 PM on Monday.  If 
started at 4:00 PM on Monday, then it should timeout at 4:00 PM on Tuesday, 
and so on.  Has anyone else needed to solve this issue?  If so, what was your 
approach?  Ideally, it would be neat if I could do something like this:

  <activity name="Review Journal Entry" 
class="com.marathon.workflow.concern.MAsynchronousActivity" 
asynchronous="true" user="true" optional="false" timeout="86400" 
time-unit="business-seconds">

For now, I'm taking the approach of using an environment variable:

  <activity name="Review Entry" 
class="com.marathon.workflow.concern.MAsynchronousActivity" 
asynchronous="true" user="true" optional="false" timeout="86400">
    <env-enry>
      <env-entry-name>time-unit</env-entry-name>
      <env-entry-type>java.lang.String</entry-entry-type>
      <env-entry-value>business-seconds</entry-entry-value>
    </env-entry>
  </activity>

And then manually adjusting the return value of "getTimeout()" from my 
AsynchronousActivity implementation.
If this functionality were moved into the Con:cern core, we would probably 
want to use an interface that the end-developer can implement, much like 
Quartz does.  Quartz allows you to handle "business" days via this interface:

  public interface Calendar {
    public boolean isTimeIncluded(long timeStamp);
    public long getNextIncludedTime(long timeStamp);
  }

You just do this to adjust time:
  long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
  if(!calendar.isTimeIncluded(now + timeout)) {
    return (calendar.getNextIncludedTime(now + timeout) - now);
  } else {
    return timeout;
  }