Thoughts on building a calendar/schedule solution

[RWX]

I'm about to start work on a project that will require a group calendar/schedule. I've never developed something like this in FileMaker, although I think I have a pretty good grasp on what is required. I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the subject, has built such a solution, knows of a good open-source solution I might be able to check out, etc?

I've looked at a few commercial calendars build in FileMaker, specifically The Hive, Dave Dowling's Calendar, and Schedula Pro. Each applied to me on some level, but I'm really not sure I want to buy a solution and then try to integrate it. Given our needs, I feel that it may be best to write one myself. At any rate, I'd welcome any thoughts anyone might have on the subject.

Thanks!

-Rob

[Lee Smith]

There are several commercial, shareware and freeware solutions out there. One that I like a lot is Appointments 1.0 by Don Wieland which can be downloaded from his site:

www.dwdatacomcepts.com

While you're researching this, do a search at these two sites for calendar, planner, organizer, events, schedule

http://www.fmforums.com

http://www.databasepros.com

HTH

Lee

[Fenton]

I've also built a calendar/scheduler, which I'd be willing to sell; cheaper but fewer features than the "commercial" solutions. It's on my web site, but unfortunately there is no documentation on it, as yet. It would be really only useful to other developers at this point.

http://fentonjones.com/files/MU_Calendar.zip (395K)

Unless you've got a lot of time on your hands, and are very fond of repetitive calculations, relationships and layout objects, I'd recommend buying at least the base, rather than building your own from scratch. There is a whole lot of work to build these solutions which is both common to all (more or less) and tedious to build; lots of relationships, lots of portals on layouts, lots of scripts to deal with them.

On the other hand, perhaps your needs are very specialized, and nothing you see will cover them. There are a a couple of good free calendars in the Sample files section of this site, one by Ellen G., another earlier by DJ.

But the Calendar is only half the scheduling solution. You also need a "TimeGrid," which are time slots for appointments in a day. I don't think I've ever seen a complete free one of these anywhere.

[Ugo DI LUCA]

I also developed one recently. It's not over as the project got delayed by the customer. I even thought of developing it my own and try to sell it elsewhere.

It's a multi-user calendar, allowing multiple appointments to be made across several employees agendas.

But the more you customize a calendar, the less it suits someone else's need. The less you customize it, the less you'd be able to give interest for it.

Agreed the "Time-Grid" was the hardest part to build and script, but isn't it the center of any "scheduling" solution ?

Once you've built a nice grid, the tricky part is to have it implemented efficiently. As obvious as this statement may appear, I've lost my brain more than once with all the conditional needed.

i.e.

Mr Fenton is booked from 14h00 to 15h15, but free from 15h30 to 16h30. Cool, let's book this 1 hour he has left....But no, his first appointment was in LA while the second is in Chicago...

I've not listed all of them, but from one solution to another, there would be about a 1,000 conditionals for sure. What's yours ?

[Ting]

I seem to have stumbled on this discussion. Sorry to digress but I have a related question about integrating dynamically, a FileMaker Pro database for scheduling with iCal and perhaps also Address Book in Mac OSX. Any of you developers tried it? Got a solution? Think it can be done?