Challenge: Vacation Calendar

MNGriffith

I am writing a system that will help my boss track vacation requests. The system will allow users to login, request days off and display their current calendar.

Admins to the system will be able to approve vacation requests in addition to the other functions.

One of the tricky bits is to determine how many days of vacation to deduct from an employee for a particular request.

If I have Saturday and Sunday off, and I request Friday, Jan. 10 through Monday, Jan 13 off, that is 4 days of real time but only 2 days of vacation should be deducted from my allocation.

Any thoughts how, using PHP & MySQL, I can go about this? Specifically, if I have a table that knows the number of days of vacation I have and which days I have off, how can I use MySQL's date functions to determine the number of vacation days to deduct when given the start and end days of the vacation request?

ultraslacker

1 - From mysql, return start and enddate, as well asl total days off by calculating days between start and end date (use mysql function to_days on both endpoints and subtract).

2 - Loop through days and count Saturday and Sundays


while ($current <= $end)
{	
	if (date("w", $current) > 0 AND date("w", $current) < 6)
	{
		// a week day
	} else {
		// a weekend
		weekend_days++;
	}
	$current = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("$current + 1 days"))
}

Substract weekend_days from total_days.

Holidays not on a weekend will be a little more difficult - you will need a holidays table and count the rows that are between the two vacation dates. Subtract that from the result in 3.

ratass2002

It's easy, just add an extra field in your form, asking the user how many days of actual vacation there is without including the weekends or holidays. This works because your boss will review the request to approve anyways. That's how our place does this.
It will save you some time to figure out if it's a holiday, and it it's a weekend.