Event Duration
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 SeedCode 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 Date” field on the "More" tab of the the “Edit Appointment” screen when creating or editing an appointment. (End dates are visible when you edit appointments but are not shown on the daily view; if you use them a lot you could certainly add the field to the daily layout much as we’ve added an end time field.)
If you add an end date to your appointment, the appointment will display on the calendar for each day from the start date through the end date. Note, however, that these appointments won’t always “line up” from one day to the next. That is, they visually won ‘t look like a banner, because on some days the appointment may be the first appointment for the day and on other days it may have appointments before it.
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 appointment on the Scheduling tab (if the appointment has a resource) and on the week views (except for the basic 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 appointments to indicate the start or end times of the event, one appointment 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 appointments 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 appointments 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, see Edit Appointments.
Can I Enter a Default Duration for Each Appointment?
Absolutely. You’ll do this by editing the field definitions of the Appointments table, changing the definition of the ApptTimeEnd field.
Let’s say you want each appointment to default to a duration of 1 hours. To begin, select File / Define / Database. Select the “Fields” tab of the Define Database panel and select Appointments from the pop-up list of possible tables. You can now edit the field definition for the ApptTimeEnd 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 can type in the following:
ApptTimeStart + ( 60 ''' 60 )
Remember that FileMaker thinks of time in seconds, so we need to multiple 60 seconds by 60 minutes to get a duration of 1 hour. Close the calculation window by clicking OK and then uncheck the check box beside “Do not replace existing value of field (if any).” That’s it; now each newly created appointment will have a duration of 1 hour- though you can change the duration by simply editing the appointment’s end time. Note that with the “Do not replace existing value…” box unchecked, any changes to the appointment’s start time will recalculate the end time again.
Remember, end times are completely optional in SeedCode Calendar, so you don’t need to enter them if you don’t want to.
