Compute WorkOrder End Date

Prerequisite: You must be familiar with the Syntax used in Tutorials

In this usecase, we want to automatically compute the end date of a WorkOrder to its start date + a fixed delay of 2 hours.

• To do it with the Designer you must have Designer PHP developer profile.
• To do it with an extension, you must have already created an extension.

By default on a WorkOrder the End date is mandatory, so we change this logic, as it is useless to require the user to enter a data which will be set automatically just after.

itop_design / classes

    <class id="WorkOrder" _delta="must_exist">
      <fields>
        <field id="end_date">
          <!-- allowing ticket_id to be empty, as it will be computed -->
          <is_null_allowed _delta="redefine">true</is_null_allowed>
        </field>
      </fields>
    </class>

Computation is not something which can be done with XML. For this we need to add a PHP method on the class WorkOrder to compute the end_date. And we want this method to be automaticaly called when the object is persisted.

• You cannot invent any method name
• You have to use one of the possible @overwritable-hook methods defined on DBObject class.
• There are different methods which can be used, which are called at different stages of the creation/modification process.

Below we will list different methods which can be used to achieve the current usecase

• OnInsert()
• OnUpdate()
• ComputeValues()

class:WorkOrder

  public function OnInsert()
  {
     parent::OnInsert();
     $oStartDate = new DateTime($this->Get('start_date'));
     $oEndDate = clone $oStartDate;
     $iDuration = 2*3600 ; // 2 hours in seconds
     $oEndDate->modify( '+'.$iDuration.' seconds');
     $this->Set('end_date',$oEndDate->Format(AttributeDateTime::GetInternalFormat()));
  }

With the OnInsert() method, if the Start Date is modified by the user later, the End Date will not be automatically recomputed.

If you want to achieve this, you can define the OnUpdate() function on the WorkOrder class on top of the OnInsert().

As they do the same code, you can group this code in a separate method ComputeEndDate() this one being freely named as only your code need to call it.

class:WorkOrder

  public function ComputeEndDate()
  {
     $oStartDate = new DateTime($this->Get('start_date'));
     $oEndDate = clone $oStartDate;
     $iDuration = 2*3600 ; // 2 hours in seconds
     $oEndDate->modify( '+'.$iDuration.' seconds');
     $this->Set('end_date',$oEndDate->Format(AttributeDateTime::GetInternalFormat()));
  }
  protected function OnInsert()
  {
     parent::OnInsert();
     $this->ComputeEndDate();
  }
  protected function OnUpdate()
  {
     parent::OnUpdate();
     $this->ComputeEndDate();
  }

There is another method which can be used to compute a field.

class:WorkOrder

  public function ComputeValues()
  {
     parent::ComputeValues();
     $oStartDate = new DateTime($this->Get('start_date'));
     $oEndDate = clone $oStartDate;
     $iDuration = 2*3600 ; // 2 hours in seconds
     $oEndDate->modify( '+'.$iDuration.' seconds');
     $this->Set('end_date',$oEndDate->Format(AttributeDateTime::GetInternalFormat()));
  }

Also the End Date is automatically computed, the user has the feeling that he can/must set it manually. To prevent misleading message, you can force the End Date field to be read_only when editing a WorkOrder.
For this check: Force a field to be read only