I'm fairly experienced with FileMaker and have been using it for about 20 years.
I need to replace our old Holiday / vacation planner with something that all users can see approved holidays and add holiday requests. I'm sure that SeedCode calendar can do this and I have played with the free version but I'm having a few problems in making it easy to use.
I want to replace times with Morning, Afternoon and All day, in both the add an event and the calendar display.
A holiday can be a single morning, afternoon or all day, multiday holidays can start as all day or afternoon and can finish all day or morning so this would need to be add event script I think.
(In the free version when I added an event it showed the same start time on every day)

I also need to colour code the holidays as Requested (red) and approved (green) I assume I can do this simply by using a conditional format but I can't see where to add the format.

There are also rules that need to be incorporated ie employees a,b,c,d,&e are in a team and only two members of that team can be on holiday at the same time. Also d and e cannot be on holiday at the same time regardless of the rest of the team.

Each emplyee has a fixed number of days holiday per year I also need to check the request against their allocation.

If anyone can give me some pointers as to where to look inorder to change / implement these features I will be eternally greatful.

There are only 15 employees in the company so the six lines per day view should not be a problem

Thanks
Ian

Hi Ian,

Hope all is well!

I want to replace times with Morning, Afternoon and All day, in both the add an event and the calendar display. A holiday can be a single morning, afternoon or all day, multiday holidays can start as all day or afternoon and can finish all day or morning so this would need to be add event script I think.

Hmmm. This is a bit of a challenge. The calendar is driven by times to show up on the grid, and the longest default we have available is 1 hour:



This could be increased, but would require updating all the scripts that reference this scale, doable, but a challenging. Another approach would be to just have all day events and then tags them as morning or afternoon, and then change the sort to show the morning ones above the afternoon ones.

I also need to colour code the holidays as Requested (red) and approved (green) I assume I can do this simply by using a conditional format but I can't see where to add the format

The Pro calendar has color coding by field contents built in. We actually use some tricks for this, as conditional formatting requires the hard coding of the colors, and we also think it's a bit slower. We've got more on colors and the Pro Calendar here.

http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... ventColors

There are also rules that need to be incorporated ie employees a,b,c,d,&e are in a team and only two members of that team can be on holiday at the same time. Also d and e cannot be on holiday at the same time regardless of the rest of the team.

Nothing "out of the box" for this. Doing offscreen finds to test whether an event is valid or not is doable, but challenging as well.

Each emplyee has a fixed number of days holiday per year I also need to check the request against their allocation.

Not as tricky as the one above, but same kind of process. When the event is submitted, do an offscreen find of the events to see if this can be accommodated as well.

We do offer modification packages, so if you think need some assistance here, please let us know at

[email protected]

hth,
Jason

Hi Thanks for the reply, I didn't think I would be causing you guys so much trouble.
My thoughts on the morning, afternoon and all day problem was "smoke and mirrors" I added a radio button field to the event form and a script trigger (or Calculation) to enter 8:30 - 12:30 12:31- 16:50 or 8:30 - 16:50 into the hidden (by me) event start /finish time. The problem with this was the time showing in the calendar views. I couldn't see where the summary text is generated for each date. and also the multi day events as I wasn't sure how these were generated, I thought I may have to use more smoke and mirrors, make an "Add Holiday" layout which would generate multiple single day events, each day event would probably have to be deleted individually or add an "event ID" field common to the holiday group.
I assumed I would need the pro version, in fact I was going to purchase it even if the free version could cope. I've spent enough time building Filemaker databases to appreciate how much time and effort you have put into this.
The rules I thought could be handled by scripts luckilly there are only 3 important rules ie, not A&B, not B&C and only 2 of b,c,d,e ,f
Tracking each employee holiday allocation I thought I could use an aditional emplyee table containing fields for Allocation, Used, available, carried forward etc.
Do you think this would work? Can you forsee the problems?
Thanks
Ian

Hi Ian,

No Trouble

We've got some documentation for removing the time from the month view, but you can extrapolate for the other views if needed.

http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... imeFormats

The column on the left in the week and day view is the field CalendarRows::TimeDisplayCalcs, so you can modify the calc itself, or remove the field from the layout altogether.

The rules I thought could be handled by scripts luckilly there are only 3 important rules ie, not A&B, not B&C and only 2 of b,c,d,e ,f Tracking each employee holiday allocation I thought I could use an aditional emplyee table containing fields for Allocation, Used, available, carried forward etc.

Right, so these would be aggregates based on the event data. If they are calculations, they will be un-stored, so there could be a performance hit. Making them indexed fields and using script triggers to keep them updated might be worth trying, but only if the un-stored calcs are too slow.

hth,
Jason

Hi Ian, hi Jason,

that's exactly the way I want to use SeedCode Calendar.
Are there any experiences available?

Thank you very much,
Christian

Hey Christian,

I'm not sure what you mean?

Cheers!

Hey Jason,
I want to organize holidays as described by Ian (it is not needed to manage Morning, Afternoon and All day separatedly). I wanted to ask for any further resources or code snippets available?
Thank you very much, Christian

Hi Christian,

For Holidays, I think the easiest approach is to create an Event status called "Holiday." By default Statuses are what drives the colors, so that should make these types of events easy to pick out. Filters are also set to work on Statuses, so you can also quickly set a filter, so that just Holidays show.

Hope that helps and Cheers!