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repeating appointment anomaly

PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 4:30 pm
by smoore
FMPA 9.0v3 on OS X 10.5.6
I'm evaluating SeedCodeCalendarPro 4.41 demo and I created a repeating appointment starting July 1, 2003 and ending July 5, 2003 from 7 AM to 7:05 AM.
I end up with 1 appt on July 1, 2 appts on July 2, 3 appts on July 3... all the way up to 5 appts on July 5. And then it works its way back down from 4 appts on July 6 to 3 appts on July 7 to ... 1 appt on July 9.
Is it me?

Thank you.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 8:45 pm
by John Sindelar
Possibly. ;-)

It sounds like you've created a multi-day appointment AND set it to repeat. So the first of the multi-day appointments is from the 1st to the 5th and will show up every day between those two dates: since you added an end date the appointment "spans" every day between the 1st and 5th. (This is the kind of appointment you might create to record that someone was on vacation for 5 days.)

Now when you set that to *repeat* every day, you've created the same 5 day appointment to start one day later, so you have it starting on the 2nd, but your first appointment also spans the 2nd, so you have two appointments for that day.

If you wanted to just have one appointment per day from the 1st to the 5th you'd usually create *either* a multi-day appointment or a repeating appointment.

For instance, creating a single day appointment on the 2st from 7am to 7:05am and the having that appointment repeat each day until the 5th would probably get you what you wanted.

Hope that helps.

PostPosted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 2:18 am
by smoore
Thank you - it sure seems obvious now.
I did wonder why there were two places for an end date, but since I was looking for repeating, I never thought of multi-day.

What I really want to do is schedule medications for a summer camp - do you think SeedcodeCalendarPro can handle it? or do you know of a better tool?
There are 400 campers per year - maybe 200 have meds which they could take up to 4 times per day (plus other times as needed).
So I'll need to schedule 200 campers for up to 4 or 5 appts per day for 49 consecutive days.
Is it ok for start time to match end time - 7 am - 7 am?
Would you use repeating or multi-day?
Is it feasible to script the creation of all those appts and a handy UI to go with it? (They will be entered one camper at a time.)

PostPosted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 9:47 am
by John Sindelar
smoore wrote:What I really want to do is schedule medications for a summer camp - do you think SeedcodeCalendarPro can handle it?


I do. You can enter a couple campers' schedules into the Demo version to make sure.

smoore wrote:There are 400 campers per year - maybe 200 have meds which they could take up to 4 times per day (plus other times as needed).
So I'll need to schedule 200 campers for up to 4 or 5 appts per day for 49 consecutive days.
Is it ok for start time to match end time - 7 am - 7 am?
Would you use repeating or multi-day?


You don't need to enter an end time: if the meds are given at 7am, just enter 7am as the start time, leave the end time and end date blank, and use the repeating function to schedule this dosage to repeat every day or every other day as needed.

smoore wrote:Is it feasible to script the creation of all those appts and a handy UI to go with it? (They will be entered one camper at a time.)


Sure. Once you've linked the calendar to your file (where the camper are) you can check out the "New Activity" script we have on the Contacts(Placeholder) tab (in Settings). This script will start a new appointment for the current contact / camper. You'll create one appointment for each time a camper needs to take a medication: so if someone take pills at 7am, 2pm, and 5pm each day, you'd create three appointments for that person, creating the 7am appt first, then setting it to repeat. Then creating the 2pm appointment, and setting its repetition, etc.

And of course you can modify these scripts if you want them to do something differently.
Hope that helps.