EasyCalendar Initial Comments

[Joel Shapiro]

Hey Tim

 

Thanks so much for EasyCalendar, it's really pretty awesome.  I've played with it a bit on a project I'm working on that has a table of Events.  A few comments/questions that I've got:

 

a) My Events table has 3 date fields (EventDate, SignupDeadline, CancelDeadline) and EasyCalendar works well to include all of them -- so it seems you could change/clarify "from multiple tables" in your documentation into "from multiple fields".

 

b ) Before I dive into it myself & potentially reinvent your wheel, have you thought about allowing 'hard-coded' or static text for some of the settings instead of having them come from fields?  e.g. with some set delimiter, allow "{{255;0;0}}" or "{{Bold HighlightYellow}}"  This could allow us to set a whole category of events, e.g. all SignupDeadlines or all events from Table2 -- without needing to add fields.

 

c) You may have caught this already, but the script step to sort a day's events by startTime is incomplete.  Should include:

"¶ORDER BY "" & GetValue ( $$Event_Begin_Time_Field_Name; 1 ) & """ ; 

instead of:

"¶ORDER BY¶3";

 

d) It might be nice to sort also by endTime in case two events have the same startTime.  (Or maybe by Description?)

 

e) Your License names "EasySync" instead of "EasyCalendar"

 

f) FWIW: When I just re-opened my local (unhosted) DB with EasyCalendar integrated, the "FMEasyCalendar - Beta 1" script somehow kicked in automatically and I had to use Script Debugger to stop the script at 28,000 EasyCalendar records.  I haven't tried troubleshooting that yet...

 

More as they come...

 

Thanks again,

-Joel

 

[timdietrich]

Joel --

 

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I'm going to review them and see what's possible...

 

Also, regarding this one "f) FWIW: When I just re-opened my local (unhosted) DB with EasyCalendar integrated, the "FMEasyCalendar - Beta 1" script somehow kicked in automatically and I had to use Script Debugger to stop the script at 28,000 EasyCalendar records.  I haven't tried troubleshooting that yet..." - Yikes! Sorry about that... I'll look into it, and see if I can reproduce it.

 

-- Tim

[Joel Shapiro]

Hi TIm

 

It seems like at least one problem is with the initializing of $$display_data.

 

When I manually go to the EasyCalendar layout, I want to start things and load a month so I click one of the buttons at the top (e.g. rightArrow/NextMonth), and this ends up passing as the parameter a question mark ("?") -- and not a blank value(!) -- because $$display_data hasn't yet been set.  

 

So:

IsEmpty ( GetValue ( Get ( ScriptParameter ) ; 1 ) 

returns 0

 

which in turn leads to the never ending loop.

 

I'd thought the first time I'd had this problem (as I mentioned above) the script started running automatically as soon as I opened the file, but I can't be sure of that now and that hasn't repeated.

 

-Joel

[timdietrich]

Joel --

 

Great feedback, and very helpful! Thanks.

 

I've just posted Beta 2 of EasyCalendar, which addresses the issue that you described:

 

http://fmeasycalendar.com

 

Thanks again!

 

-- Tim

[Didier Daglinckx]

Hi Tim,

 

Wouldn't the files :

 

License.html

Read Me.html

Change Log.html

 

be

 

.txt ?

 

[timdietrich]

Hi Didier.

 

I'm moving to HTML for the license, read me, and change log files. I'm hoping that this will resolve formatting issues that Windows user have had.

 

-- Tim

[bcooney]

Hey Tim,

Just added EasyCalendar to my solution, and ran into a couple of issues that you may wish to include in your documentation.

• The Body Part Definition for the Month/Week view layouts should not have Use alternate row state and Use active row state checked.
• The Layout Setup should not have Show current record indicator in List View checked.

Thanks again for these great files!

Barbara