What data structure is recommended for multiple calendars, dates and durations?

Question

I have a requirement to store dates and durations arising from multiple different calendars. In particular I need to store dates that:

1. Span the change to Gregorian calendars in different countries at different times
2. Cover a historic period of at least 500 years
3. Deal with multiple types of calendar - lunar, solar, Chinese, Financial, Christian, UTC, Muslim.
4. Deal with the change, in the UK, of the year end from 31st March to 31st December, and comparable changes in other countries.

I also need to store durations which I have defined as the difference between two timestamps (date and time). This implies the need to be able to store a "zero" date - so I can store durations of, say, three and a half hours; or 10 minutes.

I have details of the computations needed. Firebird's timestamp is based on a date function that starts at January 1st, 100 CE, so is not capable of being used for durations in the way I need to record them. In addition this data type is geared up (like most timestamp functions) to record the number of days since a base date; it is not geared up to record calendar dates.

Could anyone suggest:

1. A data structure to store dates and durations that meet the above requirements OR
2. A reference to such a data structure OR
3. Offer guidelines to approach the structuring of such storage OR
4. Any points that may help me to a solution.

EDIT:

@Warren P has provided some excellent work in his responses. I obviously have not explained what I am seeking clearly enough, as his work concentrates on the computations and how to go about calculating these. All valuable and useful stuff, but not what I intended my question to convey.

I do have details of all the computations needed to convert between various representations of dates, and I have a fairly good idea of how to implement them (using elements such as Warren suggests). However, my requirement is to STORE dates which meet the various criteria listed above. Example: date to be stored - 'Third June 13 Charles II'. I am trying to determine an appropriate structure within which to store such dates.

EDIT:

I have amended my proposed schema. I have listed the attributes on each table, and defined the tables and attributes by examples, given in the third section of the entity box. I have used the example given in this question and answer in my definition by example, and have amended the example in my question to correspond. Although I have proved my schema by describing somebody else's example, this schema may still be over complicated; over analysed; miss some obvious simplification and may prove very difficult to implement (Indeed, it may be plain wrong). Any comments or suggestions would be most welcome.

Answer 1

If you are writing your own, as I assume you intend to, I would make a class that contains a TDateTime, and other fields, and I would base it on the functionality in the very nicely written mxDateTime extension for Python, which is very easily readable, open source, C code, that you could use to extract the gregorian calendar logic you are going to need.

Within certain limits, TDateTime is always right. It's epoch value (0) is December 30, 1899 at midnight. From there, you can calculate other julian day numbers. It supports negative values, and thus it will support more than 400 years. I believe you will start having to do corrections, at the time of the last Gregorian calendar reforms. If you go from Friday, 15 October 1582, and figure out its julian day number, and the reforms before and after that, you should be able to do all that you require. Be aware that the time of day runs "backwards" before 1899, but that this is purely a problem in human heads, the computer will be accurate, and will calculate the number of minutes and seconds, up to the limit of double precision floating point math for you. Stick with TDateTime as your base.

I found some really old BorlandPascal/TurboPascal code that handles a really wide range of dates here.

If you need to handle arabic, jewish, and other calendars, again, I refer you to Python as a great source of working examples. Not just the mxdatetime extension, but stuff like this.

For database persistence, you might want to base your date storage around julian day numbers, and your time as C-like seconds since midnight, if the maximum resolution you need is 1 second.

Here's a snippet I would start with, and do code completion on:

TCalendarDisplaySubtype = ( cdsGregorian,cdsHebrew,cdsArabic,cdsAztec,
   cdsValveSoftwareCompany, cdsWhoTheHeckKnows );
TDateInformation = class
      private
         FBaseDateTime:TDateTime;
         FYear,FMonth,FDay:Integer; // if -1 then not calculated yet.
         FCalendarDisplaySubtype:TCalendarDisplaySubtype;
      public 

        function SetByDateInCE(Y,M,D,h,m,s:Integer):Boolean;
        function GetAsDateInCE(var Y,M,D,h,m,s:Integer):Boolean;
        function DisplayStr:String;
        function SetByDateInJewishCalendar( ... );
        property BaseDateTime:TDateTime read FDateTime write FDateTime;
        property JulianDayNumber:Integer read GetJulianDayNumber write SetJulianDayNumber;
        property CalendarDisplaySubType:TCalendarDisplaySubtype;



   end;

I see no reason to STORE both the julian day number, and the TDateTime, just use a constant, subtract/add from the Trunc(FBaseDateTime) value, and return that, in the GetJulianDayNumber,SetJulianDayNumber functions. It might be worth having fields where you calculate the year, month, day, for the given calendar, once, and store them, making the display as string function much simpler and faster.

Update: It looks like you're better at ER Modelling than me, so if you posted that diagram, I'd upvote it, and that would be it. As for me, I'd be storing three fields; A Datetime field that is normalized to modern calendar standards, a text field (free form) containing the original scholarly date in whatever form, and a few other fields, that are subtype lookup table Foreign keys, to help me organize, and search on dates by the date and subtype. That would be IT for me.

Answer 2

Only a partial answer but an important piece.

Since you are going to store dates in a very broad range where a lot of things happened to calendars, you need to accommodate for those changes.

The timezone database TZ-database and the Delphi TZDB wrapper around the TZ-database will be of big help.
It has a database with rules how timezones historically behave.

I know they are based on the current calendar schemes, and you need to convert to UTC first.

You need to devise something similar for the other calendar schemes you want to support.

Edit:

The scheme I'd use would be like this:

• find ways for all your calendars to convert to/from UTC
• store the calendar type
• store the dates in their original format, and the source of the date (just in case your source screwed up, and you need to recalculate).
• use the UTC conversions to go from your original through UTC to the calendar types in your UI

--jeroen