How to change the starting date of a Calendar Year to something other than Jan 1st?

Question

I'm writing an app that relies on the calendar and calendar events to display data to the user.

I need to be able to let the user select the beginning of his/her 'fiscal' year in settings, which will be the 1st of any of the 12 months. This is an app for military users, and any given unit's fiscal year can begin on whatever month their unit (base) decides.

The data I'm displaying to the user needs to be divided into 'fiscal' quarters according to the user's setting of the beginning of the fiscal year, not calendar year.

I'm not having problems retrieving, editing or deleting the events, I can't figure out how to change the beginning of the year to anything besides Jan 1st.

I found NSDateCategoryForReporting on GitHub, that seems like it's exactly what I need, but how do I tell it that the year begins on the 1st of x month?

Answer 1

iOS doesn't natively support this, so you'll have to find a plugin to do this or write your own. Your best bet is to write a class that performs the date conversions using the standard NSDate, NSCalendar, etc.

For instance, you could store what day the user specifies as their starting fiscal year. Then you can calculate the number of days difference between that and January 1st, and just shift dates based on that.