Hi

I haven't quite been able to figure this out.. just thought I'd post up my situation for some possible solutions/feedback.

We have 2 offices, each with their own appointments, plus seperate appointments for Home Visits(all sharing same client db). We need to be able to look at appointments from both offices in a comparitive view.. like a side-by-side comparison.

Currently, I just made each office a seperate Resource, with different Types of appointments.

I ended up having to make 2 seperate resources for each office, because of different types of appointments filling up the same time slot; makes it easier to view in Schedule View. (OfficeA, and OfficeA-2)

Daily View - I'm thinking of trying to get the portal to show just two of the resources(ApptsForOfficeA + 2ndaryApptsForOfficeA); then just change the filter to show the other office(Schedule View would be used for side-by-side comparison of the different locations).. However, the filter will only work with 1 resource at a time.

Weekly View - Somehow.. we would need this view to show whats going on for all 3 locations(OfficeA, OfficeB, and HomeVisit), seperately, in 1 layout. Like a seperate portal for each location.. or larger portals with summary fields for each location.

Also, will probably add a field to show which key employee will be at each location for a given day. We wouldn't require such detailed appointment info in Weekly/Month view.

Month View - Same as Week View

I was thinking of creating a seperate table for each location.. but looking through the relationships(and after the experience of linking up our client database), that won't be a simple task.

Another suggestion I got was to create seperate calandars for each location.. that would mean 3 file references in our client database to each calendar file.. but they can't share the same table names. If I got that to work, I was then thinking of somehow referencing the other files from one calendar to get everything on one layout; as an alternative to creating new tables.

This is something I'm still looking into.. but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cool post. Thanks.

A couple things come to mind...

Daily View - I'm thinking of trying to get the portal to show just two of the resources(ApptsForOfficeA + 2ndaryApptsForOfficeA); then just change the filter to show the other office(Schedule View would be used for side-by-side comparison of the different locations).. However, the filter will only work with 1 resource at a time.

That's not quite right - and I guess we should be more clear on this - but the resource filter *does* support multiple selections- you just need to hold the shift key down to select more than 1 resource at a time.

The daily view is the simplest of the Table Occurrence sections in the calendar. So, if you're not using To-Do or Other Items, you could create a second Daily Appointments portal, below your first one, hard-coding the office attribute so each portal shows one office. You could even use the layout space occupied by the To-Do list section for this so that you could collapse or expand an individual office as you needed to.

Weekly View - Somehow.. we would need this view to show whats going on for all 3 locations(OfficeA, OfficeB, and HomeVisit), seperately, in 1 layout. Like a seperate portal for each location.. or larger portals with summary fields for each location.

If that really is the requirement- 3 separate views at once - then you're looking at replicating the week portals and table occurrences two more times. That is a lot of redundant code. I would normally suggest 3 windows, but until we can have globals that are mapped to the Window (not the session) that won't work.

In a sense, this is what we've done with the 3 portals already there (appointments, to-dos, and other items). You could use those as a start... cannibalizing not just the layout objects, but the table occurrences as well would give you a head start.

I was thinking of creating a seperate table for each location.. but looking through the relationships(and after the experience of linking up our client database), that won't be a simple task.

I think what you'd want here is a 4th filter: one explicitly for "location", but that doesn't get around the "separate views but at the same time" requirement. Separate appointment tables for each location is a ton of work and make searching pretty frustrating. I think you'd be better off with your last suggestion if you interpret "separate calendars" as separate interface files. You could then hard code your location filter into the interface file- essentially mapping your "global" filter to the window (now its own file). This would let you have a multi-window month view where you say all 3 location months at once... if your screen real estate would let you see them all at once.

Lastly, for things like the week view, you *could* try to solve this with sorting. That is, instead of showing three portals, you'd sort your appointments by location within one portal, perhaps coloring or font-altering them in some way so that it was obvious that there were 3 distinct lists within the one list. This can look very nice without causing any real Table Occurrence work.

(I bet you can even create "separator" records to keep the appointments for each location apart. Simply create one appointment for each location starting 1/1/2000 and ending on 1/1/2010 and use your sort order to keep them above the actual appointments for those locations. A little custom background color and it could look very nice.)

Hope that helps,

John

Whew... thanks for the reply, that was very helpful. I'll see what I can do

My mind just goes blank every time I go to Define Database..

Within a script, is it possible to replicate Shift+Clicking to select multiple resources for the filter?

Set Field on CalFilterResourceGlob works, I just can't get it to select more than one resource.

Sure, the multiple selections are just separated in the filter by carriage returns (the paragraph symbol in your calculation editor). So set the filter to something like:

IDXofItemA & <<paragraphsymbol>> & IDXofItemB

wow that was simple.. i was leaving out the & operators.. never used em for anything in the past

thanks again

I'm back..

Got the Daily View working just fine, trying something different with the Weekly view.

We don't need to see the times of appointments in Week/Month view, so I'm trying to condense the info so it just shows how many appts are happening on that day for each location:

like for July 21st,
Burnaby
-3 Starts (Resource 1)
-2 Follow-ups (Resource 1)
-3 Oximeters Out (Resource 2)
-2 Oximeters In (Resource 2)

and so on for Vancouver (Resources 3&4) and Home Visit (Resource 5).

If I'm correct, in order to do this, I need to get a count of Location(Resource) and ApptType. The only way I can see to get the count.. is to first run the filter to single out what I want counted, and then count em.

I tried making a calculation field.. I'm not even sure if what I'm doing would even work because of the way the "Let" function works.. but here's sort of what I was trying to do:


Let ( CalendarMonthWeek::CalFilterResourceGlob = "1. Burnaby" & ¶ & "2. Burnaby Ox" ; Count ( AppointmentsMoWk2::ApptResource )


That little bit there won't work.. but that's the sort of workaround I had in mind..

To temporarily set the filter so that I could run a count.

Is there a simpler way? Or is there a better solution?
Sorry for these long posts.. I just want to be clear.

what i need is a "Set Field" sort of function in a calculation field

ok.. i might have something goin with scripts, will probably have to be looping. not sure how it might affect performance