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Migrate from XML to JSON

This page serves as a guide for how to migrate from XML to JSON in cases where there are significant differences.

Vacant Employees​

Before the transition to JSON, employees had a vacant field. This field indicated that employees were not tied to any specific individual, but were collecting non-overlapping shifts that were not assigned to actual employees. The mechanism governing the vacant field functioned as a black box due to its complexity, leading to its removal during the shift to JSON.

In the JSON framework, an alternative approach has been adopted. Now, vacant employees are managed through the prioritization constraint. By assigning a priority score of 0 to these employees, the system is configured to prioritize regular employees.

This change leads to increased customizability and transparency when dealing with vacant employees. For example, default day/week rest rules will also affect vacant employees if specified. Moreover, one can decide which constraints should apply to vacant employees by setting the constraints employeeIds field.

Employee Max Hours Default​

This is not a significant change, but it might lead to very different schedules if not handled correctly. The maxHoursInFTECountPeriod field in the workTime object of employees now defaults to the maximum number of hours possible. This means that the default value will be 168 (total hours in a week) times the number of weeks in the planning period. In XML, the default value for the field MaxHoursInPlanningPeriod was 0 for normal employees and unlimited for vacant employees.

Employee week hours replaced with Max And Min hours​

With XML, the weekHours field in the workTime object of employees was used to specify the number of hours an employee should work in a week. With JSON, this field no longer exists, and uses only minWeekHours/maxWeekHours. If the value is not specified, there is no upper limit to amount of hours for an employee.

The maxWeekHours field can be exceeded if the maxWeekHoursWeight is set to a value less than 100, in which case the solver will try to minimize the number of hours exceeded, but it can happen.

Personnel Groups and Competences replaced with Employee Attributes​

In JSON, the personnelGroups and competences fields in the employees object have been replaced with the attributes field. This allows the integrator to define exactly which custom attributes an employee should have. Shifts, Demands, Tasks and Constraints can then be configured with requirements for these attributes.

WeeklyRestRules replaced with Periodic Rest Constraints​

In JSON, the weeklyRestRules field and dayRestRules field in the configuration object have been replaced with the periodicRestConstraints field. This also deprecates the WeeklyRestConstraint. This change was made to allow for more flexibility in defining rest rules. The periods field in the periodicRestConstraints object allows for easier specification of recurring periods, such as weekly or monthly. This change also makes use of the customizable setup that the constraints provide in JSON.