Two-Part Question

Q 1) Our company manages the scheduling of advertising/marketing campaigns around public seminar events for professional practices. For example, an attorney client of ours would schedule a "Living Trust Seminar", so we need to set a date as to when to contact the newspaper to place an ad for the seminar, or when they must mail their invitations, as well as track the seminar date itself. We have many clients across the country and we only want to see one client at a time on the calendar.

We would also need the ability to schedule and display global events like holidays, as well as the ability to either display or filter other global events that we define. e.g., we have a standard day of a specific week that followup postcards should be mailed, for direct mail campaigns, (for all clients) but sometimes we don't want to see those when we send them a PDF of their calendar. Those "auto" events are calculated based on the prior events for each client.

Is this something you can help me modify your calendar to do?

Q 2) We're still using FMS 5.5 on a 50 file solution, which I'll be converting to 8 later on this year. We're currently using a FMP calendar solution by DaveDowling.com, and I've modified it to work the way I've described above. But I like yours' better, and since I'd have to start the custom modification process over again with Dowling's, when I migrate, I'd rather spend the time with yours, if it's possible.

Now, the one big difference between your calendar and Dave Dowling's, is you use 6 records (one per week) to calculate your month view. Dave uses one record with 42 fields for each day in 6 weeks. With this, I modified it by adding 12 more records (13 total, the 1st record being whatever month view you're on, the 2nd record is Jan., etc. through Dec., for printing purposes) so I could print out a full year, one page per month.

So my question is will your system of calculating a month enable the ability to modify it so a full calendar year can be printed with one page per month, in a single document?

Paul,

Thanks for posting, let me answer your second question first.

This is indeed a change that can be made, but it is complicated on a couple levels. First you will have to modify a custom function that determines the date the portal for each day is dependant on.

The field that uses this function is the CalDateKeyCalc 1-7 fields. This provides the date set for the left key for the relationships shown in each portal for the week in the month view. This field is a complicated custom function that uses a date as its primary input. This date is the calculation fields CalDateCalc 1-7 correspondingly.

Now if you are still with me. The CalDateCalc fields are calling a custom function that returns a date that is dependant on many factors, but the one you will be interested in is the value that is referred to as RecordNo in the parameter, but ends up getting calculated to "slot" in the custom function.

This value is tested to be between 1 and 7 at the end of the custom function, if it is outside this range, it is set to be the relevant date for the first week of the target month. You can test this by expanding the window in the month view and creating a few new records. You will notice that while they are at the end of the month, they are the same as the first record.

This makes the calendar hard to "break" by adding or deleting records, and is a safeguard you are going to have to modify to produce the results you are looking for.

Once you get that custom function to return the dates you want, the rest is easy print layout management. For safety sake I would recommend working with a backup of the fields, and perhaps a duplicate set of fields, relationships and layouts.

I hope this was helpful, and let me know if any of this needs clarified.

Court

Paul Fenley wrote:Two-Part Question

<Snip>

Q 2) We're still using FMS 5.5 on a 50 file solution, which I'll be converting to 8 later on this year. We're currently using a FMP calendar solution by DaveDowling.com, and I've modified it to work the way I've described above. But I like yours' better, and since I'd have to start the custom modification process over again with Dowling's, when I migrate, I'd rather spend the time with yours, if it's possible.

Now, the one big difference between your calendar and Dave Dowling's, is you use 6 records (one per week) to calculate your month view. Dave uses one record with 42 fields for each day in 6 weeks. With this, I modified it by adding 12 more records (13 total, the 1st record being whatever month view you're on, the 2nd record is Jan., etc. through Dec., for printing purposes) so I could print out a full year, one page per month.

So my question is will your system of calculating a month enable the ability to modify it so a full calendar year can be printed with one page per month, in a single document?

Paul,

Ok, now I am diving into your first question.

The calendar has several filters, and I imagine that you can task one of them, most likely Type, to be your client filter. Alternately you can add a new filter to the display to use client. The scheduling edition has client already as a concept, and may therefore be the best choice for this modification.

When it comes to adding several dates to represent one event, I imagine you will have a "Project" record that you will link to all the appointment or to-do dates you want. In this case, when you create the records, you should script to create all the follow up records at the same time. You can look at the repeating event creation script in the existing calendar for one example of how to do this.

I hope this helps, if not, feel free to ask follow up questions.

Court

Paul Fenley wrote:Two-Part Question

Q 1) Our company manages the scheduling of advertising/marketing campaigns around public seminar events for professional practices. For example, an attorney client of ours would schedule a "Living Trust Seminar", so we need to set a date as to when to contact the newspaper to place an ad for the seminar, or when they must mail their invitations, as well as track the seminar date itself. We have many clients across the country and we only want to see one client at a time on the calendar.

We would also need the ability to schedule and display global events like holidays, as well as the ability to either display or filter other global events that we define. e.g., we have a standard day of a specific week that followup postcards should be mailed, for direct mail campaigns, (for all clients) but sometimes we don't want to see those when we send them a PDF of their calendar. Those "auto" events are calculated based on the prior events for each client.

Is this something you can help me modify your calendar to do?

<snip>

Paul,

One more point that was just brought to my attention (thanks John). There are already print routines in the calendar, and one of the main reasons we use those instead of printing the existing layouts is that portals in general don't print very well.

Sliding and portal rows do not work together very well, and the portal row count cannot be dynamic. It may be well worth your time to explore another print style that works better for the data set.

Just my 2c worth on that one.

Court