Hi all

Just got Calendar Pro with Scheduling.. and I'm trying to get it to use client data from our own database. I'm trying to follow the instructions from the built in help.. I was just wondering about one thing.

ClientTypeAheadKeyCalc

CCTypeAheadKey ( ClientNameLast ) & ¶ &
CCTypeAheadKey ( Left ( ClientCompanyName; 10 ) ) & ¶ &
"-"

What is this calc doing? The instructions are telling me to add the functions for companyname and lastname.. and end it with "-".. but I honestly have no clue what this is for.

Questions...

-What is this calc for.. can I just leave this part out?
-how should i enter the functions in our client database?
right now i'm just following with..

Left ( ClientCompanyName ; 1 ) & ¶ &
Left ( ClientCompanyName ; 2 ) & ¶ &
Left ( ClientCompanyName ; 3 ) & ¶ &
Left ( ClientCompanyName ; 4 ) & ¶ &
and so on.. "-"

Hi.

The type-ahead calc is used as the right hand side in the relationship where we show all the client's whose name or company name match a portion of the name you type into one of the filters. (You can see an example of this in the client's portal in this screenshot.)

The "-" at the end allows us to show the whole client's list if no criteria is entered into the type-ahead filter.

So, if you're planning to let users link clients to appointments in the calendar (as opposed to requiring that new appointments be created from your clients file) then I'd leave this in as it provides a fast, small-footprint interface for selecting clients. What you're doing now with ClientCompanyName looks good.

Just a few more things to keep in mind...

There is a setting on the About / Settings tab called 'Empty Client Filter Shows All/None". This is set to All by default so that if you don't type anything into the client type-ahead filter, you see a list of all clients. For larger client lists (>10,000) you may wish to set this to "None". Since the client list is sorted, you may not want to sort 10k clients each time you arrive to select an appointment.

Finally, when looking at an appointment that already has a client attached to it, we pre-fill the client type-ahead filter when you click on the little green arrow to open the client selector. (This is in the script "Edit Appointment - Client [Parameter: show] ) We set this to the beginning of the company name, so that you can easily see other clients from the same company.

Thanks for your post,

John

Thanks for the reply John, I think that cleared it up.

This Calendar/Scheduling file is pretty complicated

Yea. The Scheduling Edition certainly has a lot more happening under the hood than the regular Pro Calendar.

Glad you got the client filtering working.

John