Direct IC or BPM based on whether in or out of hours by Working Time Calendar

[Berto2002]

Is there a way for an IC or BPM to 'Get' the Details of the active Working Calendar and then make a Decision through an Expression based on whether we are 'in' or 'out' of hours?

In short, something like:

 - if in-hours then assign to team A

 - if out-of-hours, then assign to team B

There is no content here or linked from here on how or if this data is available to IC/BPM: Working Time Calendars - Hornbill

If it's not, I guess I would need to 'hardcode' my own lookups of current time using Cloud utils and comparing them against set values?

[Berto2002]

@James Ainsworth you usually have a way around things if there's no such feature. Any ideas?

For example, it would be easy if we had a time-only cloud node so we could use an expression like:

IF [current time] > [08:00] AND [current time] < 18:00 THEN...

But I can only find date/time lookups where we cannot ignore the date so cannot 'hardcode'' a time on a 24 hour cycle.

And perhaps we have a very obvious enhancement request here to allow BPM to detect whether we are in working time at any given point in the workflow?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Berto2002

There are some automation under Cloud Integrations that deal with time and days of the week.  I've not had a chance to piece it together to see if it can be used for your scenario, but I'll try and have a look to see what options there are.

[James Ainsworth]

In this example, I'm just checking for the weekend.  It is simply using the Current Day Cloud Automation.  

 

And the Saturday or Sunday branch is checking the following.

[James Ainsworth]

19 hours ago, Berto2002 said:

For example, it would be easy if we had a time-only cloud node so we could use an expression like:

IF [current time] > [08:00] AND [current time] < 18:00 THEN...

Well... this is where I am too.  I'll keep looking.

[Berto2002]

Looks like we can only filter out by day at the moment.

[Conor]

@Berto2002 I believe I have an example of this kind of thing... 

test-date.draft.bpm.txt

[James Ainsworth]

On 10/17/2022 at 1:38 AM, Berto2002 said:

allow BPM to detect whether we are in working time at any given point in the workflow

Hi @Berto2002

This is the bit of your original post that I'm not too clear on.  A colleague has shown me how to check the log time of a ticket if it was raised during work hours or out of hours.  However, the above statement "at any given point in the workflow" suggests that what you are looking for is not related to the time it was logged.  Would I be right in thinking that what you are looking for is prior to any team assignment, you want to check if the current time is out of hours or not, and assign based on that.  It's not to do with the time the ticket was raised at? 

[James Ainsworth]

In Conor's example above, he is using the Date Formatter utility to get the hour of the day.  This automation takes in the standard date format taken from the Get Local Time automation and the output format is simply using G which is just the hours.  The formats for input and output can be seen here.

Once you have this information, you can then use a decision node to check the workhours.

[Berto2002]

Ah, an inspiration. I am going to try this. Things like Regex and these date formats are a nightmare unless you're trained but looks like I can copy the above...

[Berto2002]

Ah, it only works :-)

Thank you @Conor and @James Ainsworth

I guess it's back to Hornbill now to consider whether you guys want cloud automations being called for this stuff (cost etc) or whether a solution to this should be more local like a lookup on the working time calendar, hint hint... :-)

[James Ainsworth]

@Berto2002 great to hear that you have it working.  I will feedback the request for a Hornbill Automation to lookup the working time calendar.  There are a lot of big projects going on with some great new features being worked on.  Not sure when this would be reviewed for consideration, but I'll make sure it is in the list.

[Berto2002]

That's one off the list we mentioned to @Andre de Waal yesterday.

The other is a lookup for User status :-)