Simple calendar solution

[Anuviel]

Hi all, been awhile since I've been here but it is good to be back...

I am trying to figure out a simple calendar solution with your basic month, week & day views as well as with appointment functionality.

As you might have guessed by now I am hitting a wall with the last part, appointments, what i am trying to do is to have multiple appointments per single day and also to display first 3 appointments on month view via portal or any other way.

I got as far as displaying of the appointments but it displays all of them instead of displaying only the ones for that particular day in question...

I checked around and have looked at some of the available calendar & appointment solutions but cannot figure it out, if anyone could look at my small test file and give me some pointers I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you Kindly.,

A-System.zip

[David McQueen]

I doubt simple is what it will end up being.

1. Everything lives in an events table- both appointments and display of same.

2. Each appointment captures date, time, person and whatever other particulars you want.

3. Setting appointments is a process of filling in global fields setting parameters on the screen and then calling a script to populate a new record with data from the global fields. So you will need some global fields for person, date time etc.

4. You will pull data from probably a contacts database and maybe a work group database (if you want to see for multiple people) which support your appointment functions.

5. Display is where it becomes fun.

a.) On a particular display screen you need to be able to populate global fields with the date wanted, client or work group member wanted and any other things you want to filter by. These values will set up relational keys to make the appointments visible.

b.) Each day display is a portal. You either use multipredicate relations to relate the global information to individual appointments or use compound calculated keys, which ever works for you.

c.) For a day view, it is pretty simple in that the global date selected is the day displayed. For week and month views, the global date selected causes calculated dates for each day of the week or each day of the month, so that multiple days are shown in multiple portals.

For a week view, if the global date you select is say a Wednesday, the calculated keys have to be smart enough to put in the dates for Monday to Sunday. If you change the global to say Thursday, the calculated dates must remain the same. You are looking at case statements to do this.

For a month view, if you are going to build a calendar, use day 7 as an anchor to calculate out everything else. It is the first of the 42 days that is definitely in the current month.

So a week view takes 7 relationships. A month view takes 42 relationships.

There may be other ways to do this, but this is the strategy I use in my scheduling programs.

[bcooney]

Don't reinvent the wheel. I suggest you adapt or hook in to an existing calendar template.

[Anuviel]

Thanks for the replies. I found both very helpful. I will give it some more thought before deciding if I am going to build my own or will try to hook up into an existing solution.

Many thanks.,