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Can Appointments Span Multiple Days?

Yes. In fact, overnight appointments (when an appointment begins on one day and ends on the next) really span more than one day and DayBack is programmed to show such an appointment on both days.

If you’d like to create longer multiple day appointments, simply enter a date the “End” field in the Event Detail popover when creating or editing an event. If you add an end date to your event, the event will display on the calendar for each day from the start date through the end date.

Note: If your multi-day event has a start time and an end time, the calendar will color all the hours in between to indicate the duration of the event on the Scheduling tab (if the appointment has a resource) and on the week views (except for the simple week view). This can be fine for some things, but for a multi-day event like “Business Retreat This Week”, you probably don’t want every hour of the whole week colored in. The best way to do this is to leave the times off of this kind of multi-day event. Then create additional events to indicate the start or end times of the event, one event for the start time, and one for the end time.

Consider this example; you’ll be out of town for 5 days on a business trip. Here are the event records you might create to reflect your trip. In this way, only your flight times will show up in the hours column, leaving the hours of your week free to depict other events during your trip.

Record 1
Start Date: April 4th
End Date: blank
Start Time: 6:37 am
End Time : blank
Description: Flight 304 Departs LA

Record 2
Start Date: April 4th
End Date: April 9th
Start Time: blank
End Time : blank
Description: Business Trip in Hawaii

Record 3
Start Date: April 9th
End Date: blank
Start Time: 2:30 pm
End Time : blank
Description: Flight 706 Departs Hawaii

For information about creating repeating appointments, look here.

Can I Enter a Default Duration for Each Event?

Absolutely. For events that are created using the calendar interface you can simply change a setting in the "Load Calendar Settings - On Startup" script. Open the script in "Manage Scripts" and find the comment labeled "When a new timed event is created what should the default duration be?". Just edit the variable "$$sc_DefaultTimedEventDuration" to whatever you want your default duration to be.

To set this up for FileMaker layout data entry it's simply a matter of editing the field definitions of the Events table, changing the definition of the TimeEnd field.

Let’s say you want each event to default to a duration of 20 minutes. To begin, select File>Manage>Database. Select the “Fields” panel in the Manage Database window and select SampleEvents (or your events table) from the pop-up list of possible tables. You can now edit the field definition for the TimeEnd to give it a duration. Double click on that field and select the Auto Enter tab of the Field Options window if that tab is not already selected. You’re going to click on the check box beside “Calculated Value”. Once you do, you’ll be taken to a calculation window where you'll already see our calc for managing the event ending at midnight.

Replace the existing calc with this:

Remember that FileMaker thinks of time in seconds, so we need to multiple 20 minutes by 60 seconds to get a duration of 20 minutes (1200 seconds). Close the calculation window by clicking OK. That’s it; now each newly created event will have a duration of 20 minutes- though you can change the duration by simply editing the event's end time.

Remember, end times are completely optional in DayBack, so you don’t need to enter them if you don’t want to.