Sunday, March 19, 2017

A function to return the next work day

I know there are plenty of routines already available to calculate work days, but this topic is not really about adding work days to a date or counting work days between two dates. Rather, it is an extension of the topic for making sure the result from a date calculation falls on a work day.

You are probably aware we can simply use the Weekday() function to make sure a date does not fall on a weekend. For example, the following routine will check if a given date falls on a weekend (Saturday or Sunday); and if so, we simply return the date for the following Monday.


Select Case WeekDay(InputDate)
     Case 1 'Input Date falls on a Sunday
          InputDate = DateAdd("d", 1, InputDate)

     Case 7 'Input Date falls on a Saturday
          InputDate = DateAdd("d", 2, InputDate)

End Select


I say this article is an extension of the above because I was recently asked to incorporate a check for Holidays as a non-work day. Much like the routines available for calculating work days, we need to use a table listing all the Holidays. Once we have this table, we can use the following routine to check if a date falls on a Holiday and simply return the following day.


If DCount("*", "tblHolidays", "HolidayDate=#" & Format(InputDate, "yyyy-mm-dd") & "#") > 0 Then
     InputDate = DateAdd("d", 1, InputDate)
End If


The problem with simply combining the above two subroutines is which one should we perform first? Let us say we decided to check for a Holiday first and then check for a weekend. If the new date falls on a weekend, the final result will return the date for the following Monday, and we're done. But what if the following Monday happens to be a Holiday?

Conversely, if we check for a weekend first and then followed by a check for a Holiday, we would solve the above problem. But what happens if the input date was on a Friday and it was also Holiday? Checking for a weekend first will fail and then checking for a Holiday will result on a weekend date.

So, as you can see, it is somewhat of a Catch-22 situation.

If you have followed my posts on UtterAccess, you might be familiar with how I like to use recursive functions to solve problems like this one. So, the below function is what I ended up using to continually check if a date falls on a Holiday or a weekend and return the next work day.

Public Function GetNextWorkDay(InputDate As Date) As Date
'3/16/2017
'http://thedbguy.blogspot.com
'if input date is on a weekend or a holiday, returns the next work day

On Error GoTo errHandler

'check for holiday
If DCount("*", "tblHolidays", "HolidayDate=#" & Format(InputDate, "yyyy-mm-dd") & "#") > 0 Then
    InputDate = GetNextWorkDay(DateAdd("d", 1, InputDate))
    
End If

'check for weekend
Select Case Weekday(InputDate)
    Case 1 'Input date falls on a Sunday
        InputDate = GetNextWorkDay(DateAdd("d", 1, InputDate))
        
    Case 7 'Input date falls on a Saturday
        InputDate = GetNextWorkDay(DateAdd("d", 2, InputDate))
    
End Select

GetNextWorkDay = InputDate

errExit:
    Exit Function
    
errHandler:
    MsgBox Err.Number & ". " & Err.Description
    Resume errExit
    
End Function


Hope you find it useful. Please let me know if you have any recommendations for improvement. Thank you for reading.

No comments:

Post a Comment