I'm faced with a situation that calls for me to select the previous "business
day". In the U.S. business days are generally Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, with Saturday
and Sunday not usually counted.
On most days of the week, the previous business day is the current date - 1
day. On Monday however, the previous business day is the current date - 3 days.
Federal holidays complicate the matter further. In the U.S. most federal
holidays are observed on Mondays. Therefore, on a Tuesday following a Monday
that is a federal holiday, the previous business day is the current date - 4
days.
Some federal holidays do occur on other days, so on days following one of
these, the previous business day is the current date - 2 days (unless, of
course, the federal holiday falls on a non-business day).
This is all fairly easily handled in XSLT using the <xsl:choose> element and a
list of the dates on which federal holidays are observed.
I have worked out an alternative plan that calls for using the <xslt> task to process
the file containing the list of federal holidays and create a new XML file holding the data
I want. I could then use the <xmlproperty> element to set the values of the
properties.
I don't really want to create an intermediate file to perform this task, so I'm
asking if there is any other way to achieve this result in Ant that I'm not
seeing because I have the wrong mental model.
Ant itself refrains from providing tools (tasks/types) that would make
it easy to (ab)use it as a programing language. It aims at being very
declarative, and not scripty. The rational is that it's very easy to
abstract or hide away the scripty part in smart tasks, and since Ant
is easy to extend (once the initial learning curve hump is past), in
Java code or using true scripting language, it's the recommended way.
That said, the Ant-Contrib project supplements Ant with <for>, <if>,
<switch>, <try/catch>, etc... Except for <for>, I've used it seldom,
or only initialy to prototype something before migrating the same
logic into custom tasks. --DD
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