Hello,

I am planning to purchase the Pro version of CC Calendar, but I have
several questions.

Is there a way to integrate my current FM file into the calendar
solution?

Ex. If I have an event in my database can that automatically create an
event in the calendar with a specific user and time?

Thanks.

jfd wrote:Hello,

I am planning to purchase the Pro version of CC Calendar, but I have
several questions.

Is there a way to integrate my current FM file into the calendar
solution?

Absolutely; that is precisely what the calendar was designed for. There are two broad approaches to this. You can swap out our appointments table for a table in your own solution. That is, you'd point the calendar at your file, instead of at the appointment table it ships with. The calendar comes with instructions for doing this.

A more interesting integration would be to make our appointments table a child of some object in your file: a child of your jobs table for instance so that each job has one or more related appointments.

jfd wrote:Ex. If I have an event in my database can that automatically create an event in the calendar with a specific user and time?

Thanks.

Sure. Let's say you'd make our appointments table a child of your jobs file by adding a JobID to the appointment table. In your jobs file you'd add a file reference for our appointments table and make a relationship to it from jobs based on job ID. You can check the "Allow creation of records..." option when making this relationship: this will let you *make* appointment records for the job just by typing in a related field. So, now place the Date field from this newly related appointments table on one of your job's layouts. Enter browse mode and type a date into this field and you've just make an appointment in the calendar for that job on that date.

While that is the basic principle, you can take this a lot further...

You can add auto-enter calculations to the appointment's title to bring in some information about the job, or you can make a file reference or the job's file in the calendar and display some related information about the job itself.

You can also add some static "type" attributes to the relationship between appointments and jobs so that when you type a date into your jobs file you're making a new appointment of a specific type. For instance, let's say you had a hard coded field in jobs containing the value "Installation". Adding a link between this field and the appointment type to the relationship you already have based on JobID would create an appointment of the type "Installation" when you type a date into your jobs file.

You can even have multiple relationships like this to manage multiple job dates in the calendar, or simply place a portal of a job's related appointment on your job's layout and add/edit the appointment's type by hand. This lets you see a nice history of the appointments for a given job.

You can also find instructions for linking the calendar to a contact's file you may have.

In any event, there are obviously a lot of ways to link the calendar with your file.

I hope that gets you started.