topic Check if Today() is a working day in Product Forum

Check if Today() is a working day

MartaGelea — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 14:54:35 GMT

Hello!

I need some help to create a VBO which verify if Today() is a working day without using the Calendars VBO of Blueprism.

Any ideas?
Thank you!

Re: Check if Today() is a working day

John__Carter — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 16:30:13 GMT

Do you mean something like InStr("Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday", FormatDate(Today(), "dddd"))>0

Or do you mean 'check if today is a national holiday'? You could look for an API such as https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json, and I've seen (complex) spreadsheets for UK holidays but have never used one.

Re: Check if Today() is a working day

JohnCowell — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 13:37:11 GMT

If you wanted to expand on this idea (and you are comfortable with using code stages) you could use something like Nager.Date to check for holidays and weekends. The description on the Github site (https://github.com/nager/Nager.Date) says it currently supports over 100 countries. There's also a WebAPI avaiable. This package is available via nuget and you can build/test it first using a small VS project. From a BP code stage you can then build a small amount of code that uses the Nager.Date.dll. For example, pass in a date and see if it is a holiday or weekend date. I've given this a quick test and it works fine within a code stage.

Hope this helps.

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Re: Check if Today() is a working day

bjwestwo — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 16:29:06 GMT

My team, which included @Dave Morris, created a reusable action to evaluate the given day. This action used a Blue Prism Calendar that was setup for the department that defined the Public Holidays that the department recognizes and any 'Other Holidays' such as the day after Thanksgiving. With the calendar updated yearly (kept up-to-date for any 'Other' holidays that need to be defined), the calendar object can be used to determine if the given day is a Holiday (Public or Other defined holiday). If not, the Calendar - Is Working Day action can be called to determine if the day is a working day as defined in the System - Calendar you create (you can define what days of the week are "working days"). So, I suggest reviewing the System - Calendar options and reviewing the help for the build in Blue Prism Calendars object. Using these "tools" you should be able to do what you need to do.