I have a very simple file that has proven incredibly effective for me and I would like to automate a search for time conflicts in it to make it even better. Let me explain. My file has a few basic fields - date, start time, end time, who, what and where. I would like to create a script so that I can be alerted of any possible timing conflicts or overlaps since the best part of this file is that entries can be made out of sequence and sorted later, the down side being a manual search for possible conflicts. Obviously, this would involve comparing the date, start and end times, and who fields. Any ideas? Thanks...

I would make some kinda relation back to the file itself with a key of date and start time. If I then count the number of posts thru the relation and the number is bigger than 1, I have a conflict.

To check other things, experiment with other keys and so on.

Depending on how the schedule works, I'm afraid that Johan's solution might not work. For instance, let's say that I have an appointment at 12:00 for one hour and another appointment at 12:15 for a half hour. These records won't be related with any relationship, since the start times and end times are different for both of them.

However, you could script a search for a user for a particular day in your database, sort the appointments start time, and then compare all of them. For instance, loop through the records for a day. Have a global field that will store the start and end times, for each record in the found set, compare it to what the first one was by checking the times against the global fields.

Loop