Designing Calendar Templates

The calendar template is used to define daily and weekly templates for month and day ranges. The map components may represent dates within a single year or may cross into the following year.

Remember that a main reason for creating templates is for use on the TOU Map Generation page to create data for a classic TOU map. On that page, you will specify the dates you want to generate data for. In addition you must keep in mind that you can specify one holiday template for the time period you are generating.

In our example, we have two seasons and our holiday template is different in each season. Creating a calendar template to define the seasons will not help us, because on the TOU map generation page, we wouldn't be able to indicate a single holiday template for the whole year. For our example, rather than creating a calendar template, we could simply go to the classic TOU map generation page and indicate:

• 1st Nov <year> through 30th April <year>, use the 15MinWntrWk template. For holiday overrides, use the 15MinWntrWknd daily template
• 1st May <year> through 31st October <year>, use the 15MinSmrWk template. For holiday overrides, use the 15MinSmrWknd daily template

In fact, in our example, even if our holiday template would not vary by season, one would have to weigh the advantage of creating a calendar template to define 2 seasons vs. running the TOU map generation twice. If you have a very small number of customers using the same templates, then a calendar template may not be worth creating. However, if you have many customers using the same template, it may be worth it.

Here is a possible guideline to follow for deciding whether or not to create calendar templates:

• If the same holiday template may be used for all holidays, and your customer's contracted time period definitions contain more than one season, then creating a calendar to define the seasons is recommended.
• If the holiday template changes throughout the year based on the season, then you must weigh the advantages of your possibilities:
  • You may just create weekly templates for each season and define the dates and the holiday template when using the classic TOU map generation page. This option is recommended when the templates apply to a very small number of classic TOU maps. The time taken to generate the data based on the weekly templates would be less than the time you would have spent on defining the calendar.
  • You may define your calendar to explicitly indicate your seasons and your holidays. Then when generating the data for this template, you would not indicate an override holiday template. This option is recommended when the template applies to a larger number of customers. The time taken to define the calendar would be less than that spent on generating multiple seasons for each TOU map.

Let's go ahead and design a calendar template using our weekly templates to understand the setup. For this purpose, let's assume our holiday template would be the same all year round.

Assume the seasons are defined as follows: Winter is 1st Nov. through 30th April, Summer is 1st May through 31st October. This template shows that the summer schedule includes the interval 12 AM on 01, November. This means that summer's last interval is the one that covers from 11:46 PM on the 31st of October through 12 AM on the 1st of November. The first interval in winter is 12:15 AM on the 1st of November, which covers the period from 12:01 AM through 12:15 AM. The similar setup is true for the end of winter / beginning of summer.