How to Create and Manage Time Periods

I want to create reports for sequential, predetermined periods.

Essentially, I want to be able to:

Set a time period, for example from the 10th of one month to the 9th of the ne开发者_如何学Pythonxt. Then I want to be able to run a report and have the current period attached to the report, which in this example would be August 10, 2011 to September 9, 2011. Then suppose 6+ months later I run the report again, even though it's 6+ months later the period should be September 10, 2011 to October 9, 2011.

I've thought of creating a period model that would have 'begin', 'end', and 'current' fields. The 'begin' and 'end' fields would hold the numeric day values, i.e. continuing with the above example, 10 and 9 respectively. The 'current' field would hold the current end period date, which (using the above example) would be September 9, 2011. With the 'current' period and the 'beginning' and 'end' values I could then create the next logical period on demand. Further, I'd also have the opportunity to modify the period as needed.

While the above approach should work, it doesn't seem that efficient of an approach. Are there alternative approaches that are better? What can I do, if anything, to improve my approach?

Thanks.

There is an ideal technique to solve your problem. It's called test-driven development. It's ideal in this case since you can describe the solution without having to code it. Just by describing the solution, you develop many clues about what you should actually be coding.

Since you might really have no idea what code to write yet, Cucumber seems ideal in your case. You can describe the problem you want to solve in English, run that using Cucumber, and it will actually point you all the way towards the solution.

If you have some idea about what code you want to write, you might be better off using Test::Unit or RSpec directly. These methods are closer to the actual code: the problem you want to solve needs to be written in Ruby.

Pragmatic Programmer has excellent books about these two techniques.

Since the problem you've described is of particular value only to you, you will be hard pressed to find many actual implementations on StackOverflow I think. Using cucumber to describe the problem for yourself seems the best way to go forward.