Dates
A business flag supports two dates: a Business Flag Date/Time and a Business Flag End Date/Time
• The business flag date / time is required for all business flags. For some types of business flags only one date is needed.
• For business flags that have a start and end period, the business flag date/time acts as the start date and the other field is the end date.
For a business flag that has a date range, it may be important for functionality implemented for
impacted business processes. How the process treats the date will depend on its functionality.
• For some processes, the business flag is essentially expired after the end date has passed. This applies to impacted processes that are only looking at the current status of data in the system. For example, collection processing could be held if there is a business flag currently in effect (where the current date is within the date range). It would never look at historical business flags.
• For some processes where historical data may be relevant, a business flag effective during that same historical period may impact the process. For example if a business flag denotes an outage event for a given time period, perhaps estimated consumption should never be calculated for that time period.
Note that because business flags have a status, the design for the lifecycle of the business objects for the above effective dated use cases must carefully consider the states. For business flags that are considered expired after the end date passes, the BO lifecycle may be designed to transition to a final state after that date such that the record is no longer included in active processing. For business flags that continue to impact processing for a historic period, the BO lifecycle may be designed to remain in a non-final state such that it is clear that the record is still applicable.
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