Schedules¶
The schedules table contains information about when a service is available.
Each schedule entry comprises three pieces of information:
An ID for the row
The opening times that are referred to
iCal RRULE-style fields that describe how often the opening times repeat.
Exceptional schedules¶
It’s common for a service to operate different hours over a certain period - such as a holiday.
If the service is offering additional opening hours to their regular hours, then a second entry can be added, with valid_from and valid_to set to indicate the limited range of dates that the additional hours apply for.
If the service is changing its hours, then set the valid_to value to the last day that the regular schedule is in operation, and add new entries for the service’s exceptional opening hours.
24h opening¶
HSDS doesn’t have a way to model this explicitly. If a service operates 24 hours a day, setting the opens_at and closes_at to 00:00 and 23:59 is a strong signal to any data users that the opening hours are known and 24h.
Worked Example¶
In this example, we’ll describe a service with ID 35 that’s available from 9-12 and 3-5, Monday to Thursday, every week. They know that they’ll change to a Christmas schedule in mid-December, so the schedule will be valid until then.
Note: Only relevant fields are shown, for clarity.
id |
service_id |
valid_from |
valid_to |
freq |
byday |
description |
opens_at |
closes_at |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1098 |
35 |
2020-04-01 |
2020-12-20 |
“WEEKLY” |
“MO,TU,WE,TH” |
“Monday to Thursday, 9-12 am” |
“09:00” |
“12:00” |
|
1099 |
35 |
2020-04-01 |
2020-12-20 |
“WEEKLY” |
“MO,TU,WE,TH” |
“Monday to Thursday, 3-5 pm” |
“15:00” |
“17:00” |
|
Note that in this case, the non-iCal fields valid_from and valid_to have been provided to signify that this is the period that these opening hours are valid for. Consuming systems may infer from this that as the valid_to date approaches, they should seek to find out what future opening hours are for the service; they shouldn’t necessarily infer that a service has ended - just that they don’t have any more opening time information. This is in contrast to defining the service’s opening hours by use of the until iCal field, which explicitly defines the end of a recurring event, and therefore a consuming system may infer that the service is no longer available after that time.
During the year, they decide to open on the first Saturday of each month from July until November. So, they add another row:
id |
service_id |
valid_from |
valid_to |
dtstart |
until |
freq |
byday |
description |
opens_at |
closes_at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5435 |
35 |
null |
null |
2020-07-04 |
2020-11-07 |
“MONTHLY” |
“1SA” |
“First Saturday of the month from July-Nov, 9am-5pm” |
“09:00” |
“17:00” |
Note that in this case the valid_from and valid_to dates aren’t supplied, because the RRULE is limited by its nature; it specifies when the series of events starts and ends.