The good old service flag has served the PBX for more than ten years now. It is amazing that we now found two ways to improve it significantly.

The first one is that it now (which is, after version 56) can accept also the year. This makes is possible to list longer date ranges for holidays that have varying dates. For example, Thanksgiving is coming up as a perfect example of changing holidays, every year. Now you could list the holidays for each year and make sure that the PBX goes into holiday mode on the right day.

The other change is that the holidays can also contain date ranges. This is very useful for example for schools that have closed for days. A typical example is the summer holiday where it would be tedious to list each day separately.

Also, the parsing of the pattern string should be a lot faster than before. For example, if you script automatic posting of holidays, that list can get pretty long. Fortunately, the PBX had never a hard coded string length limit, so that this is not an issue.

We will roll out the year and the range feature with builds made after today. It should be backward compatible, we don't expect problems with upgrades.