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1.9 Date Types
Date Types are high level definitions of special dates, such as
holidays or fiscal periods. Date Types are used to define the various
classes of dates which are significant to your environment. This is not
where you define the specific dates for these classes. Rather it is
where you define the classes themselves. The specific dates are defined
using the Date Definitions menu option.
You must be careful when you choose the identifiers for your Date Types and Specific Date Types. These names will be used in English language date specifications so they should be readable names. JAMS also recognizes month names before checking for Date Types so you cannot use Date Type definitions to override the calendar months.
For example, JAMS will always convert "FIRST DAY OF APRIL" to April 1st of the current calendar year. If your company uses fiscal accounting periods, your accountants may have some other date in mind when they think of the first day of April. You can define Date Types and Dates to deal with this problem.
If you define a Date Type for fiscal periods and give it the identifier FISCAL with the names of months as Specific Date Types, your accountants can specify "FIRST DAY OF FISCAL APRIL" to specify the first day of the April fiscal period. They could also specify "FIRST DAY OF FISCAL" to specify the first day of the current fiscal period.
Note that there is nothing special about the name FISCAL. It was chosen to make the date text more readable and could just as easily have been PERIOD or FP.
You may want to use unique names for the Specific Date Types in a Date Type definition. In the previous example, we could have used FP_JAN, FP_FEB etc. for the specific date type names. Then you could express the first day of fiscal april as "FIRST DAY OF FP_APR".
This field is a unique identifier for this Date Type. It will be used in English language date definitions so it should also be a fairly descriptive identifier.
The description is used in menus, lists and reports to provide a more complete description of the Date Type than provided by the Date Type's identifier.
The Continuous field is a Yes/No field which indicates whether or not this Date Type is continuously occurring. A continuous Date Type is one which spans a number of dates and consequently, is continuously occurring.
The most common example of a noncontinuous Date Type would be Holidays. Your environment may have other situations where a noncontinuous Date Type would be useful. One example would be a Company which takes physical inventories. If you have special batch processing which should be run on a day when physical inventory is taken, you could create a Date Type of PHYSICAL and then define Setups which are scheduled to run on PHYSICAL. When a physical inventory is scheduled, you simply need to add the dates and the jobs will be correctly scheduled.
You could also use the PHYSICAL Date Type to obtain default values for a jobs parameters. You could specify "LAST PHYSICAL" as the default value for a date parameter.
The most common example of a continuous Date Type would be a fiscal period. To define your company's fiscal periods, create a Date Type, such as FISCAL, and then define the starting date of each fiscal period. You may need additional continuous Date Types for periods such as fiscal quarters, pay periods etc.
You have 24 fields in which you can specify the names of specific occurrences of this Date Type. The order of these names does not matter except for the first name. The first specific date type must identify the date or period which occurs first in any given year. The concept of "Year" is user defined. You can specify the first date/period to occur in a calendar year or a fiscal year.
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