Calendar Time graph

[crazybake]

I have reviewed many of the developer solutions for calendars, but they are too elaborate for what I need.

Part of my solution tracks courses, times and days on a quarterly basis, so I do not need a perpetual calendar. The courses do not change days or times during the quarter. I am hoping to create a calendar bar graph (I have forgotten the term for this type of graph) with a layout to see which courses are offered on which days and at which times for a particular quarter in 20 minute increments. My thought was to create a collection of portals that butted up against each other to represent the length of time for each course and to evaluate overlap.

However, I cannot seem to create the proper calculation for the portal filter (e.g., StartTime >= Time(9,0,0) and StartTime <(10,0,0).
For example, a course starting at 9:00 may end at 9:40, 10:00, 10:20.. but I need the portals to account for this to create the appearance of a "continuous line" for the length of the course

thoughts? A better way for a static weekly time calendar?

[comment]

It believe you are describing a timeline chart. But I am not sure what the length of your timeline should be: with 20-minute increments and say 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, a weekly chart would have 120 segments - is that what you're looking for?

In any case, I don't see how this could be implemented using portal filters. A filtered portal omits filtered records. The line of Course B would break and jump up when Course A above it has ended. I would suggest you use a repeating calculation field (with 120 repetitions, under the above assumption). Or produce the chart in a web viewer, using either a calculation or a third-party chart tool (e.g. Google charts).

Edited October 20, 2016 by comment

[crazybake]

Thanks - I attempted what you suggested (calc field with 120 reps) - and I cannot seem to come up with the paper calculation for overlapping times.

[comment]

1 hour ago, crazybake said:

I cannot seem to come up with the paper calculation for overlapping times.

I am not sure what you mean by that.

[crazybake]

Can you clarify

On October 19, 2016 at 11:36 PM, comment said:

use a repeating calculation field (with 120 repetitions, under the above assumption). 

I may not understand how this would work

 

[comment]

Let me understand first exactly what you want. I thought you wanted a simple timeline chart showing a bar for each course. Each bar would be drawn independently of others, and overlaps would be detected by eye, something like:

Course A  ███████
Course B       █████████
Course C                  █████

where you (hopefully) can see an overlap between  A and B.

[crazybake]

Yes - that's it!

In my courses table, I have fields for days, start time and end time. I would need some direction on the calculation field to draw the bars. Do you have such an example already built?

[milanm]

There is a chart as described above in Nightwings scheduling solution. You could buy a developer version if you are up for spending some money and see how it's done exactly. It does not work so well with Webdirect though.

[comment]

1 hour ago, crazybake said:

I would need some direction on the calculation field to draw the bars.

Have a look at the attached demo. It is practically identical to what you described, except the slots are half an hour long. I have added a comment to the calculation so you will know which values to change when adapting this to your situation.

 

WeeklyTimelineOverlapR.fp7

[crazybake]

Thank you!

This is exactly what I was looking for and does the job. However, for a point of reference (or if it might help), I am getting the data from another department in Excel format. For example, the days field from the Excel file may look like any of the following: "M", "MTF", "Daily". So, the solution you provided works well if I use the CourseDays field and the course is only on a single day. At the same time, I created a CourseDaysCalc field within the courses layout that is a checkbox set with a days of the week value list.

When I import the data, I have a calculation that runs (e.g., If (Filter(Courses::CourseDays ; "M" ) > 0; List ( Courses::CoursesDaysCalc ; "Monday");Courses::CoursesDaysCalc). This works well and checks the appropriate days. However, I am not sure if or how I can use the checkbox data for the days portion of the solution - thoughts?

 

 

Edited October 25, 2016 by crazybake

[comment]

Well, a checkbox field contains a return-separated list of checked values - and if you have a calculation field named cWeekDays that returns a list of the applicable weekday names (e.g. for an input of "MWF" it would return "Mon¶Wed¶Fri"), then you can change this part in my calculation:

d = Extend ( WeekDay )

to:

not IsEmpty ( FilterValues ( d ; Extend ( cWeekDays ) ) )

Note that I am using short day names; you can change that if you also change the definition of the d variable.

--
P.S. I did not understand your description of the calculation that produces the checkboxes, and I suspect it could be a lot simpler. But I would have to know exactly what input values are expected and what do they mean - for example, "MTF" is ambiguous.

 

Edited October 25, 2016 by comment

[crazybake]

That worked perfectly.

Sorry about the vagueness in my example. I was simply trying to illustrate that the other department hand codes the days, so the syntax is rarely consistent. A course on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, may look like "MTF", while a daily class might list "daily" or it might list "MTWThF"

[webko]

I would make them not do that - inconsistent data will produce inconsistent results.

Maybe give them a checkbox set with the days of the week, for them to mark the relevant days, so the data is consistent.