Conflicts
How Are Conflicts Displayed On the Calendar?
You can choose to have CC Calendar SE flag conflicting records. Simply navigate to the About / settings screen and, in the upper right section, set “Show Conflicts on Schedule” to “Yes” or “No”. This is set to "on" by default.
The calendar considers conflicts a little differently on each screen, and you may wish to modify this behavior to suit your own business rules...
Daily View
Here appointments must share a resource, share at least one user, and overlap by more than 1 minute. We have elected to exempt "type" from this conflict consideration because we imagine many users will not be adding a "type" to every appointment. If you wish to require that conflicting appointments also share a type, simply add a pair of relationship criteria showing that "ApptType = ApptType" to the relationships between AppointmentDaily and the two "conflict" table occurrences: AppointmentsDailyConflicts and AppointmentsDailyConflictsInclusive.
(If you set your page setup to Letter / Landscape, you can click the "pages" icon in the relationship graph. Now with the graph displayed on top of a page grid we can use the graphs page numbers to refer to sections of the graph. These two "conflict" table occurrences are in page 4 of the graph. AppointmentsDaily is in page 1.)
Note that if you add the "type" attribute to the conflict criteria, appointments lacking a type will not be considered as conflicting even if all other criteria match. To get around this, create a new field in the Appointments table (called CCCalAppts) defined as follows...
If ( isempty ( ApptType ) ; "XXXXX" ; ApptType )
...and use this new field in your conflict relationships instead of simply using ApptType.
Schedule View
On each of the scheduling screens, conflicts are considered according to the current filters. So, if you have the filters blank, appointments need to share both a resource and a time to conflict. Note that with the filters blank, they don't need to share a "user" or "type" to be flagged as conflicting. If you filter by type, then appointments would also have to share a "type" to conflict. (This can be a nice way to deal with "unconfirmed", "canceled", or "tentative" appointments- create a type for these and then set the schedule filters to "hide" tentative appointments. In this state these items won't conflict with confirmed appointments. Clear the type filter to show all appointments and your tentative items would be shown as conflicting with confirmed appointments where they overlap.
Note that the red conflict indicator on these schedule views show in red just where the appointments overlap, so if you have two 3 hour appointments that only conflict for 15 minutes, the red conflict indicator would only show those 15 minutes as conflicting. If you were to click on those appointments outside of the 15 minute overlap section, you'd see just the appointment you clicked on. Clicking on the 15 minutes that overlap would bring both appointments into the found set of the Editing Window, so you could resolve the conflict.
Going Further
In summary, the daily view uses hard-coded conflict criteria, while the schedule views show conflicts according to the filter criteria. If you wish to bring the schedule views' filter-based conflicts to the Daily View, you'll find some prebuilt layout objects for you on the "Alternate Daily Objects" layout; the last layout in CC Calendar SE. This layout contains a new hours column which contains a conflict indicator like that used on the schedule views. You can use this to replace the hours column on each of the daily view. If you do, you'll likely want to delete the conflict indicators to the left of each appointment on the daily views. Not only would these be redundant (and likely misleading) but they slow things down.
Finally, if you want to warn a user about conflicts before the user exists the New Appointment process you can test for a record being present in AppointmentsDailyConflicts. Then, go to related records using AppointmentsDailyConflictsInclusive to make the current record and its conflict the found set. After you execute the Go To Related Records, the mini window header will changes to allow your users to scroll from one appt to the next.
Can I Show Overlapping Or Conflicting Appointments in the Scheduling Tab?
The calendar does display conflicting appointments on the schedule tab (it also displays a red conflict indicator so that you can easily see when appointments conflict) but the schedule views were designed to show items which should not overlap.
In most cases, you should configure the calendar so that there are no conflicting or overlapping appointments on the scheduling tab. That is, your resources should be set up in such a way that there would not normally be more than 1 appointment for a given resource at a time. Put another way, resources should be something that can not be shared: if you run a hauling company, for example, your resource should be a single truck (which can only do one thing at a time) not a type of truck (where you'd have obvious overlaps). The whole point of the scheduling view is to visually show you the gaps between appointments and you should set up your resources in such a way that these gaps make sense.
Remember, you can have almost any number of resources in the calendar, and can organize them into almost any number of resource types. The scheduling screens filter by resource type, making it easy to see just the resources you’re interested in. If you know the resource you wish to see and it isn’t currently visible, simply shift-click on the resource type filter and you’ll be presented with a list of all your resources (filtered by type); click on the one you want to have the schedule “jump” to that resource.
