ExCycle

ExCycle is a powerful library to generate datetimes following RRules from iCalendar.

iex> ExCycle.new()
...> |> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, interval: 2, hours: [20, 10]
...> |> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, interval: 1, hours: [15]
...> |> ExCycle.occurrences(~D[2024-02-29]
...> |> Enum.take(5)
[~N[2024-02-29 10:00:00], ~N[2024-02-29 15:00:00], ~N[2024-02-29 20:00:00], ~N[2024-03-01 15:00:00], ~N[2024-03-02 10:00:00]]

Installation

ExCycle is available on Hex and can be installed by adding ex_cycle to your list of dependencies in mix.exs.

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_cycle, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Time zone database

ExCycle support timezones and require a time zone database. By default, it uses the default time zone database returned by Calendar.get_time_zone_database/0, which defaults to Calendar.UTCOnlyTimeZoneDatabase which only handles "Etc/UTC" datetimes and returns {:error, :utc_only_time_zone_database} for any other time zone.

Other time zone databases can also be configured. For example, two of the available options are:

• tz
• tzdata

To use them, first make sure it is added as a dependency in mix.exs. It can then be configured either via configuration:

config :elixir, :time_zone_database, Tzdata.TimeZoneDatabase

or by calling Calendar.put_time_zone_database/1:

Calendar.put_time_zone_database(Tzdata.TimeZoneDatabase)

See the proper names in the library installation instructions.

We apply the same logic as DateTime from elixir.

Documentation

Full documentation could be found at https://hexdocs.pm/ex_cycle.

Quick-start Guide

Create a cycle and add rules

ExCycle.new()
|> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, hours: [20, 10])
|> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, interval: 2, hours: [15])

# Generates every day at 10:00 and 20:00 and every 2 days at 15:00

The first element is the frequency that could be one of secondly, minutely, hourly, daily, monthly or yearly. Then the 2nd parameter is a list of validations options (like every hours at X).

You can specified a duration using the option :duration. The value uses the Duration structured, introduced in elixir 1.17.

For every Elixir's versions before 1.17, we have been cloned this structure to obtain the same behaviour.

Options

Here the list of option that you can use to generate the rule (using ExCycle.add_rule/3).

• :interval
• :hours
• :minutes

Timezones

As we mention earlier, we support timezone and you can easily generate datetime using the option timezone: "America/Montreal" as the code bellow.

ExCycle.new()
|> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, hours: [20, 10], timezone: "America/Montreal")

# Generates every day at 10:00 and 20:00 with timezone America/Montreal

Span

ExCycle support duration (using the structs from elixir 1.17), to generates span

ExCycle.new()
|> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, hours: [10], duration: %Duration{hour: 2})

This could be combined with timezone option to generate span using timezone (with DST support).

ExCycle.new()
|> ExCycle.add_rule(:daily, hours: [10], duration: %Duration{hour: 2}, timezone: "America/Montreal")

# Generates every day from 10:00 to 12:00 with timezone America/Montreal

Credits

ExCycle is inspired by Cocktail. ExCycle's goal is to improve the handling of Timezones and DST.