Question

I am making an app for my school. We are on a 7 day rotation schedule…so today is a G day, tomorrow will be an A day, Thursday B, Friday C, and Monday back to D. I want to put a UILabel on the homepage of my app that will output which “day” it is according to our schools A-G notation…can anyone think of a way to do this (that will be understood by a beginner)?

the problem with that is that Monday is not always an “A” day, because we go on a 7 day cycle but only go to school 5 days a week. Any ways around this?

I currently use NSDateFormatter hooked up to a string then to a UILabel to display the current day of the week, if that helps. code for that is below.

 - (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated
 {

   //get the date today

   NSDateFormatter *dateformatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
   [dateformatter setDateFormat:@"cccc, MMMM dd"];

  NSString *dateToday = [dateformatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];

   [currentdate setText:dateToday];


   //get the time today

   NSDateFormatter *timeformatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
   [timeformatter setDateFormat:@"hh:mm a"];

   NSString *timeToday = [timeformatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];
   [currenttime setText:timeToday];

question:

would I use “setText:” to output it to the label? I declared an outlet called *letterday in my .h, and now am trying to send the letter to it, and then this in my .m:

[NSDate JL_currentRotationDayWithSchoolYearBeginningOnDateString:@"2011-09-12"];

[letterday setText: 

does that look right? sorry im so behind on this…

Answer 1

You can view the source code for the entire category here with comments: https://gist.github.com/1590955

#import "NSDate+RotationScheduleFormatter.h" in every implementation file in which you would like to use the category. Then use the following method call to get the current rotation day:

[NSDate JL_currentRotationDayWithSchoolYearBeginningOnDateString:@"2011-08-01"]; where the date is in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

This will return a enum of type RotationDay, one of kRotationDay[A-G].

In order for holiday breaks and other weekdays off of school to work you need to go into the .m file and edit the method called + (int)numberOfWeekdayBreakDaysBetweenSchoolYearBeginningDate:(NSDate *)beginningDate andEndDate:(NSDate *)endDate1

In it you will see an array called weekdayBreakArray with a few values (in the format YYYY-MM-DD). Remove these test values and add in every day of every break that lands on a weekday. Do not add dates that are on weekends.

Implementation:

Assuming there exists a UILabel called rotationLetter, you can do the following:

RotationDay rotationDayInt = [NSDate JL_currentRotationDayWithSchoolYearBeginningOnDateString:@"2011-08-01"];
if (rotationDayInt == kRotationDayA) {
    [rotationLetter setText:@"A"];
}
else if (rotationDayInt == kRotationDayB) {
    [rotationLetter setText:@"B"];
}

and so on with more else if statements until you reach kRotationDayG.

Notes:

Remember to enclose your call to this method in an if statement that checks if you’re on a holiday break or on the weekend since the result will be incorrect otherwise. Also note that I did not optimize this class for memory management using manual retain/release because I wasn’t sure if you’re using ARC. Furthermore, the entire system fails if you have a snow day or some other unexpected break and you cannot update the app in time. Therefore I highly advise that you download the array of dates from a server every time you open the app in case you need to make a change on the fly.