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The When Dimension1 plays a fundamental role in Multidimensional Systems, it allows us to express when the analysed focus of attention have occurred.

The purpose of the when package is to assist in the implementation of the When Dimension. In particular, it supports the generation of tables with the granularity needed (second, minute, hour, date, week, month, quarter, semester or year) in Multidimensional Systems implemented on a ROLAP (Relational On-Line Analytical Processing) star database. It relies on the functions offered by the lubridate package to obtain the components from the date and time.

Installation

You can install the released version of when from CRAN with:

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("josesamos/when")

Example

To obtain a table with dates we indicate the start and end date. Alternatively we can indicate the set of dates to consider. We can select the level of detail, the attributes to include or the language of the literals for day and month names. In the following example we indicate the language because it is different from the one we have in the computer’s operating system.

library(when)

date <-
  when(
    locale = Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "English"),
    start = lubridate::today(),
    end = lubridate::today() + lubridate::years(5)
  ) |>
  generate_table() |>
  get_table()

The first and last rows of the obtained result are shown below.

pander::pandoc.table(rbind(head(date, 5), tail(date, 5)),
                     split.table = Inf)
id date month_day week_day day_name day_num_name year_week week year_month month month_name month_num_name year
1 2024-01-09 09 2 Tuesday 2-Tuesday 2024-02 02 2024-01 01 January 01-January 2024
2 2024-01-10 10 3 Wednesday 3-Wednesday 2024-02 02 2024-01 01 January 01-January 2024
3 2024-01-11 11 4 Thursday 4-Thursday 2024-02 02 2024-01 01 January 01-January 2024
4 2024-01-12 12 5 Friday 5-Friday 2024-02 02 2024-01 01 January 01-January 2024
5 2024-01-13 13 6 Saturday 6-Saturday 2024-02 02 2024-01 01 January 01-January 2024
1824 2029-01-05 05 5 Friday 5-Friday 2029-01 01 2029-01 01 January 01-January 2029
1825 2029-01-06 06 6 Saturday 6-Saturday 2029-01 01 2029-01 01 January 01-January 2029
1826 2029-01-07 07 7 Sunday 7-Sunday 2029-01 01 2029-01 01 January 01-January 2029
1827 2029-01-08 08 1 Monday 1-Monday 2029-02 02 2029-01 01 January 01-January 2029
1828 2029-01-09 09 2 Tuesday 2-Tuesday 2029-02 02 2029-01 01 January 01-January 2029

If we want a table with time, we indicate the type using a parameter. By default we get all the seconds of a day but we can also configure a different period or level of detail.

time <-
  when(type = 'time', start = "08:00", end = "17:00") |>
  generate_table() |>
  get_table()

The start and end of the result table is shown below.

pander::pandoc.table(rbind(head(time, 5), tail(time, 5)),
                     split.table = Inf)
id time hour minute second day_part
1 08:00:00 08 00 00 Morning
2 08:00:01 08 00 01 Morning
3 08:00:02 08 00 02 Morning
4 08:00:03 08 00 03 Morning
5 08:00:04 08 00 04 Morning
32397 16:59:56 16 59 56 Afternoon
32398 16:59:57 16 59 57 Afternoon
32399 16:59:58 16 59 58 Afternoon
32400 16:59:59 16 59 59 Afternoon
32401 17:00:00 17 00 00 Evening

The day_part attribute is predefined in English. Literals or associated hours can be changed using a configuration function.

In addition to obtaining them as tibble, we can export the tables to files in csv or xlsx format. They can also be exported directly to any Relational DBMS.