Very Basic Calendar View

[ckai]

I'm hoping someone can give me a little more direction. I've searched for a few hours on this and downloaded some samples so I know it's pretty difficult or I'm missing something and complicating it.

A little background. We place temporary staff and want an easy way to show when we have staff available (after they tell us).

I'm after a little calendar that only shows the dates for a month within an existing layout. If staff are available for the day, it's formated to show as a different colour. Clicking on the day will show in portal those that are available.

Developing this further, I thought for our staff layout screen (that shows staff details), the same calender view would be included but clicking on the day would open a popup that we could input what shifts they're available for that day (AM, PM, Night etc). Kinda like a "reverse" calendar popup if that helps.

I've had a good look at Seedcode's calendar and thought I could try and adapt it. It's an awesome package but I'm unsure how to have the mini-calendar show days with something happening on them. I also have a popup date picker that I was thinking of trying to implement into the layout.

If I knew how to create the calendar, I'd be fine but I have no idea how people have developed the dates to change when going through the months to correspond to the correct days.

I know I can use conditional formatting and other techniques, I'm just unsure as to how to pull it all together or apply existing solutions to our database.

haha it seemed such a good idea.

[comment]

Try starting from here:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/201229/post/317650/#317650

[ckai]

Sorry about the late reply but thanks comment.

I saw the simple calendar example from my searching and it wasn't playing ball. I'll have another look into it and look more into the other example you posted.

[ckai]

After a few weeks working on this and using the example so kindly provided by comment in this post I've made some good headway.

I've created the calendar for the staff layout which the user clicks on over-laying buttons. This places a 1 or null ("") value into a field in the Availability table (AM, PM, Night).

I thought this would have made it easy to create a summary field of all the staff that are available for a given day and shift (simply adding up all the 1's).

I wanted to place a table type layout on my Clients layout which showed the totals. But I can't seem to get the totals to display. I'm putting it down to a relationship issue since I'm not sure how I should set it up.

I've attached an example since it'll be easier to see what I mean (yes it's untidy. It's my testing file). I can create a summary report but I would like to show how many people are available on a given day when the shifts get entered for the client hence why I want it on the Client Layout.

Any suggestions or ideas will be most welcomed (since I need all the help I can get). Even if it's a different direction.

Thanks

Example.fp7.zip

[ckai]

Decided I'd go a slightly different route and instead of the calendar, created a portal list that shows all the staff's availability based on the shift date.

I figured this would give me more scope to be able to filter the list based on start time's etc in the future.

[ouioui]

I was delighted to find your post. Your solution is exactly what I'm looking for to manage clients asking for training sessions, and the trainers who are available at any given date or time. Would you be willing to share your modified/updated version? Trying to not recreate the wheel. I very much appreciate your help.

[ckai]

I was delighted to find your post. Your solution is exactly what I'm looking for to manage clients asking for training sessions, and the trainers who are available at any given date or time. Would you be willing to share your modified/updated version? Trying to not recreate the wheel. I very much appreciate your help.

Wow, I had to download that file to jog my memory. It really was a test file I may not get time to upload another example file within the week and stripping the data out of the current one will more than likely confuse more than help as it's grown a bit. But we still pretty much have the same structure as the example file. I just ended up placing a portal on the Clients layout that showed all staff available from today onwards (with a few other links and conditions to the client).

The portal simply shows the staff name, date and what shift (AM, PM, Night in "columns" ) they are available for. I used conditional formatting in some overlaid text fields that would correspond to whatever shift equalled 1. More of visual aid instead of a whole bunch of 1's.

I hope that'll give you a start/idea until I can update the example with something similar to what we ended up with. It really was as simple as creating a portal on the clients layout based on the availability table and including the staff, date, AM, PM and Night shift fields.

[ouioui]

I was delighted to find your post. Your solution is exactly what I'm looking for to manage clients asking for training sessions, and the trainers who are available at any given date or time. Would you be willing to share your modified/updated version? Trying to not recreate the wheel. I very much appreciate your help.

Thanks for your prompt reply. I'm trying to figure out how once the shifts are assigned, the staff availability chart gets modified to reflect this booking. Also, how can you generate a list of ALL staff available for a particular date and shift? And lastly, can you get a MONTH instead of WEEK view of the availability chart? Perhaps you've done this in your updated version, or I'm just not seeing it. I guess you could say I'm a "junior" programmer, so perhaps I'll have to dig deeper and analyze longer to understand all the relationships and field definitions. I do appreciate your willingness to share all your hard work, and do not for a moment take it for granted. Thanks again.

[ckai]

Thanks for your prompt reply. I'm trying to figure out how once the shifts are assigned, the staff availability chart gets modified to reflect this booking. Also, how can you generate a list of ALL staff available for a particular date and shift? And lastly, can you get a MONTH instead of WEEK view of the availability chart? Perhaps you've done this in your updated version, or I'm just not seeing it. I guess you could say I'm a "junior" programmer, so perhaps I'll have to dig deeper and analyze longer to understand all the relationships and field definitions. I do appreciate your willingness to share all your hard work, and do not for a moment take it for granted. Thanks again.

You're right mate. This is the same way I sorted out a few things with it...by asking about examples. As you can tell, I haven't got around to modifying anything to give you a working example. Now, my brain isn't working too well today so bare with me. Hopefully I won't makes things sound too jiberish

1. Reflecting assigned shifts in the availability chart (in my case portal):

I added a unstored calculating field in the Availability table called Working. If ( Date = staff_SHIFTS::shiftDate ; 1 ; 0 ) which said if date in the Availability table = date in the the Shifts table put 1 otherwise 0. I then used the Working field to filter any portals showing staff availability.

2. Showing ALL staff available:

You could use global fields to filter any portals that show availability. This probably doesn't help you at all but if you need more info on this just do a search for something like "filter portal by drop down" or whatever you want to use. My portal just shows every one that is available from today onwards so can't really help you with that specifically. I have an option box that filters a portal of current, finished or ALL clients so they're not hard to do.

3. Month view:

I just realised that by availability chart you probably mean the grid that we use to select when staff are available. Making this month view is possible but could be some work. We still use the week view and just use the arrows to go forward or back a week. We're only interested in the coming week at a glance so have never had a need to develop anything else. I can take NO credit for the chart. It was provided by a generous member (can't remember who now) on a FM forum. I just played around with it to make it look the way we wanted. I think it's pretty impressive hence why I haven't touched it. I'm pretty much a 'junior' as well and have learnt everything from digging through things and looking at examples (and pulling them apart). I'd say the month view would need some impressive relationship structures although I can vaguely remember stumbling upon an example that used a far simpler method with only one relationship just with different filters for each day. Sorry, can't think of where but it was just a blog for doing a filemaker calendar. I'd say since you already have a table availability in it, it shouldn't be too difficult to apply or show this info on a calendar view. I've thought about doing this myself but haven't found a real need. Maybe in the future.

One thing we do do is have an opening script that updates the gDate to todays date. Just helps show the most relevant info.

Our database is a mess when it comes to structure and it certainly wouldn't help anyone I've actually be trying to tidy it and streamline it a bit lately to help with development in the future.

Feel free to ask anything else and hopefully I can help.