looking for some ideas on how to handle recurring activity

nlarson

I am going to be creating a OB which handles task type work. Sometimes this will recur, sometime not. Since recurring can be a tricky item I am wondering how others might have handled this? i considered using the supports recurring feature, but the restrictions of that approach seem like they might be more trouble than it's worth (i.e. creating all instance at once, forcing an end date, etc.). Here is the approach I am considering.

Create BO with
- attributes for done, due on, an similar core task data points
- a very basic recurring model using rules which leverage the the Aware Days, Week, Month, Quarter functions
When the user creates an instance of the BO, the first task instance is created. Then, if that is marked as 'done', then fire rules to create 'next' task instance and so on until the user removes the recurring option.

How does that sound? any other ideas?

nlarson

took me less than an hour to build and works so well I am dumbfounded!! Aware for the win.

tford

How did you solve it?

nlarson

I did it mostly as described above. I added a pick list, with the options for Never, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Annually. The default value is never, but if the user set the item to 100% complete, a rule fires on the save event to close that task and open a new on rolling the date forward. Ifhey set the value to never the cycle is terminated.

Here is one of the rules as a sample:

If Deliverables.Recurrence='Quarterly' AND Deliverables.Done='Yes' Then
DUPLICATE Deliverables EXCEPT Done,Delivered,CreateDate,CreateBy,Expected,Confidence,Blocking,PreviousActions,NextActions,Summary
ThatDeliverables.DueBy=MONTH_ADD(Deliverables.DueBy,3)
ThatDeliverables.StartOn=MONTH_ADD(Deliverables.StartOn,3)

tford

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

nlarson

quick note on this -

After some testing I had to add a logical field to indicate the item has been recurred already, else each time a use saves a completed item it would create a new duplicate instance. Minor design oversight which did not come up in testing.

corradomatt

That's a very interesting idea. I wonder how it would work for having a recurring item start "every 3 weeks" or something similar. I have a project that would need to have instances created every X weeks on a particular day. Like "every 4th thursday" for example.