I wanted to know if SE catches conflicts for both users and resources. Right now we make an appointment and assign a resource (room). Then assign a user. SE catches the conflict if the same room is booked concurrently, however it doesn't catch the conflict if a user is booked concurrently in two rooms. I really need it to display these conflicts either way. There would never be a time when a user would be in two rooms at once. Is there a way to modify SE for this purpose?

Thanks in advance.

If you need the conflict to display an "OR" situation (the recond conflicts with the room OR the user in another room) you'll need to create a second conflict table occurrence and a second relationship to it. Thus you'd have one based on the user conflict and one based on the room conflict. If you're testing for conflicts in scripts or calc fields you'd test both relationships flagging if either passed. If you're using our red conflict indicators, you'd just have two on top of each other- one for the user conflict and one for the room conflict.

Hopefully that gets you started.

I appreciate your reply, however, I am pretty much an FMP novice. So a little more of an explanantion would be greatly appreciated. Is it possible to walk me through what you were suggesting? To recap, I want to flag conflicts, using the red indicators, that show a user and a resource conflict. We have editors (users) that occupy suites (resources) and if the editor is out on a personal appt., I need to catch the conflict of them being scheduled in a room concurent with their personal appt.

Thanks in advance!!
Rob
414-347-1100

Hi Rob,

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you on this. I think I've got a much simpler solution for you: you can edit the conflict display on the daily view so that any conflicts with the user get flagged, not just conflicts with the same resource.

Check out the Relationship Graph by selecting Define / Database from the File Menu. Find the "-- Daily Views --" section of the graph and check out the relationship between the AppointmentsDaily table occurrence (TO) in green and the AppointmentsDailyConflicts TO also in green and to the lower right. Double click on the line connecting these TOs to edit the relationship.

You'll see that one of the criteria pairs is "ApptResource = ApptResource". Delete that pair. You'll want to do that same with the TO right below this as well: AppointmentsDailyConflictsInclusive.

Let us know if that gets things behaving the way you'd like.

Best,

John

Well, that worked great for flagging "User" conflicts, however, it doesn't catch the "Resource" conflict in Daily view now. (It does show a red line in the Shedule View) I really would like it to flag both user and resource in Daily View AND Schedule view.

When I deleted the criteria pairs "ApptResource = ApptResource" did I screw up the ability for it to catch both conflicts?

TIA again!!! Not being a developer, I appreciate the "dumbed down" explanations.

Rob

Now I see where you're going.

You're going to want to overlay a second red indicator on top of the one already there on the daily view. This second indicator will show resource conflicts so the two indicators will appear as one user-OR-resource conflict indicator.

So this may not be for a "non-developer", but there is only one way to find out. So backup your file and give this a shot. If you decide to bail out, send me a copy of your file and I'll do it for you (email to john at seedcode.com).

Find the "AppointmentsDailyConflicts" TO on the graph that you edited the other day. See the Red and Blue TOs off to the right of it? You'd going to duplicate those three TOs and give them slightly new names, like "AppointmentsDailyConflictsResource" for instance. Once you have this second set of TOs related to each other, you'll relate the green one (formerly named "AppointmentsDailyConflicts 2") back up to the AppointmentsDaily TO.

This relationship will be exactly like the one between AppointmentsDaily and AppointmentsDailyConflicts except that instead of ApptUser = ApprUser, you'll use ApptResource = ApptResource instead.

Once that is done, head over to the Daily View and copy and paste that red indicator, creating another version of it. Double click on it and you'll see its really a related field (from the red, right most TO you'd just been working with). Change the name of the TO under "Display Data from" to be the second version of AppointmentsDailyConflictInterface you just created on the graph (perhaps named "AppointmentsDailyConflictInterfaceResource" ).

Once you get there you'll be flagging the conflicts for Users or Resources.

Going Further...

To view the conflicts you'll need to edit the "Day" section of the Edit Appointment script. See the place where we test for the presence of a conflict? Well now we're only testing for the presence of one of our two conflict types. You'll need to add a second test for the second set of conflict TOs you created. Then, when it's time to go to the conflict youll need to make a second copy of the "AppointmentsDailyConflictsInclusive" TO. In much the same way as you made a second copy of AppointmentsDailyConflicts above, you'll now have two versions of AppointmentsDailyConflictsInclusive: one for Users and one for Resources.

Again, feel free to send me the file, but do spend some time playing with this as it will be effort well spent.

Best,

John

We ended up making some of the changes described above, so I thought I'd post a screen shot of the relevant section of the graph showing the parallel sets of conflict TOs:



We've modified the existing green TO to be based solely on the User. Then added a second, parallel set based on the Resource. The "inclusive" TOs use the same criteria without omitting the current record's PrimeIDX; we use these to GoToRelatedRecords in the Edit Appointment script. That script now contains an ElseIf in the Day section to test for Resource conflicts (and go to those) after it tests for User conflicts.

Hope this helps anyone making these changes in their own copy.