How to add the repeat control to an appointment form

JonP

I noticed in the calendar query an Editing and Resources section that lets you use your own processes instead of the default ones. I'm trying to extend the functionality of the appointment form by adding the initiative it is associated with, the organizer, agenda items and attendees.

I see that there's a control in the built-in process that allows for repeating events (never, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly). The attributes related to this feature are non-intuitive to put it mildly. Is there any documentation on the subject? Has anyone figured it out? An example BSV?

ACDC

The recurring feature on the calendar will not interface to a custom process on the calendar. It's useless, all it does is place fake items on the calendar - I spent many hours trying to make this work with my custom process.

The only alternative is to make you own recurr functionality which is quite possible. That's what I intend to do. i.e place a process button on the existing event that creates multiple events based on the contents of the existing event, using the same concept as the "fake" recurr feature, but limiting the amount of recurring that can take place

JonP

That's just what I needed. Thanks for saving me hours of frustration!

tpis001

I have a powerful sql solution that creates events in recurring orders in many different frequencies. We did this to get round the problems with the calendar.

I'd be happy to share the code with you if it would at all help.

PointsWell

I have the recurring appointment functionality working.

It is very opaque and requires non intuitive elements in the recurrence field.

The RecRule code is below, but it is important to add the weekstarts setting. And it has to be Sunday.

The following RecRule will generate an annual event on September 13th. If you don't put the WKST=SU it doesn't work.

FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=9;BYMONTHDAY=13;WKST=SU

JonP

Thanks for the offer, tpis, but I see that you're using SQL Server and I'm using MySQL. Though I'm sure others could use your solution.

PointsWell, does your solution produce actual instances of the appointment object or are they fakes/ghosts as ACDC suggests? Since there doesn't seem to be an endpoint indicated, I assume the latter. Your code would still be useful to have and maybe I could concoct a process to convert a ghost into an actual instance (though as I'm contemplating this, I'm thinking that's probably not realistic).

PointsWell

JonP wrote
I assume the latter. Your code would still be useful to have and maybe I could concoct a process to convert a ghost into an actual instance (though as I'm contemplating this, I'm thinking that's probably not realistic).

From you last post I get the feeling that I don't understand your use case.

Recurring appointments are stored as a single instance. If you want to be able to touch these with a Process at a point later than the original date then you'd have to start interrogating the RecRule attribute to pull the Month and Day (or add some additional attributes to the BO to strip these elements out for easier processing - obviously this comes with an overhead and a bunch of questions - does changing the frequency after the initial event apply to one or all, how does a date change impact the future records etc).

Alternatively if you want the database to contain a line for every recurrence (and don't want to utilise any of the AIM calendar functionality such as the little recurrence symbol) you could create your own recurrence attributes with business rules to generate these (or utilise triggers on the DB table). I would reckon though that this is a whole world of unforeseen pain at a later point and one that personally I would steer well clear of.

JonP

Yeah, I think I'm just going to drop it. Thanks for your advice!