Storing periodicity in Rails

Question

I am giving users an option to receive, say, emails at a periodicity of their choice, for example:

Every day at 5am

or

Every Friday at 11pm

or even

Every second Monday of the month at 12am

What would be my best choice for storing this kind of data in order to feed it to Whenever gem?

Update

I was able to solve the question with @mudasobwa 's advice in combination with the cron_parser gem. The process flow is:

• Get user's input from a select box on the frontend
• Parse it on the backend and de-code into cron format (e.g. 7 would mean that I will need to send emails every week, so the code could be "1 1 * * 1"), store the value as periodicity.
• Use the cron_parser gem to generate the next_run dateformat which is used to tell whenever gem which jobs it needs to perform that are dated.

Answer 1

whenever gem accepts a raw cron syntax. That is why the simplest way, involving as few transformations as possible, would be to store values in raw cron format.

That said, you probably should have a parser from/to allowed user input to/from raw cron format and that’s it.