Temporal rules (time of day) past 23:55

[Brian Dunne]

Hi all,

We've got some clients whose regular business hours might extend to midnight or beyond. If I try to enter anything later than 23:55 via the Monster UI, I get a validation error that the end time is earlier than the start time. However, the API will let me submit a time_window_stop of 0:00 or 01:00 without complaint. I know we could do a separate rule to account for a Friday->Saturday wrap by creating a Saturday 0:00-2:00 rule, for example, but not being able to set the Friday rule to stop at midnight means there's at least a 5-minute gap during which the rule can't be active if configured via Monster UI.

Anyone know how the actual time of day calculation is performed if, for example, my TOD rule is active every Friday from 1100 to 0200? And if that works as one would expect, maybe the Monster UI validator needs an update to allow wrap-around time spans.

[Karl Stallknecht]

We have the same issue...would love a way to solve it.

[Mooseable]

Instead of having a ruleset for when they are open (if the open hours go over midnight), define when they are closed. Then when the temporal rule is true, route to your voicemail/ivr/whatever. Then set all other times to go to your "Business Hours" route.

[Brian Dunne]

That's a nice work-around. Trouble is, we are trying to put together a generic TOD set that can be templated and applied to all of our client sub-accounts. Our hope was that we could have one rule for each day, allowing our customers to tweak those hours as needed. If we have to add/remove sets in order to accommodate these wrap-arounds, that makes our setup a lot more complicated.

[Brian Dunne]

Just to clarify the behavior for others who might have considered other solutions to this:

1) Setting the time_window_stop value earlier than the time_window_start value (i.e. open from 9am-2am) causes that rule to be ignored, or treated as inactive. The API probably shouldn't allow users to do this, just as it protects them from #2.

2) The API will not allow you to set the time_window_stop value higher than 86400 (which is 24 * 3600), so there's no way to say "we're open from 1100-2530 on Fridays".

Currently it looks like we'll have to hack around this using additional rules (e.g. Friday 0900-2400, Saturday 0000-0200, Saturday 0900-2400).

Edited January 8, 2019 by Brian Dunne (see edit history)