Best Practice to find Day of Week

[cdredmond]

We have run into the need several times to know the day of the week and have created our own work around based on the situation.
Is there a best practice to identify the day of the week (e.g. Tuesday or Sunday) in TI and in Rules?

[tomok]

I am not aware of any "best practice" but one way of determing the day of the week is to use the following formula:

MOD(DAYNO(TODAY),7);

If it returns 0 it is Friday (because 1/1/1960 was a Friday), 2 is Saturday, 3 is Sunday, and so on through 6. You can either do an IF, ELSEIF construct or put it in a lookup cube.

[lotsaram]

Chris - i find the best way is to create a lookup cube, or even just an attribute of a system date dimension, containing various date information. This way you can easily return any date related information (day of week, month, financial period, period start date, period end date, days in month, days MTD, days YTD, etc, etc, etc) for any date not just the current date.

It is a very obvious and simple approach yet I am constantly asounded by the myriad of complex rules and date calculations in TI that I observe when all that is required is a simple lookup. All it takes is a small amount of forsight to create and prepopulate the required time lookup values.