Hi,
I downloaded the SeedCode Pro demo earlier to see if it would be able to handle visit schedules in my business. It looks great but I'm not sure if it will do everything I need so could do with an experienced user to give me their views before I purchase.

We provide security visits to customer premises 24x7 and would like to log the number of visits, the times, and how long each visit should take for each customer.

A simple customer visit schedule may be 2 random vists per night between 20:00 and 05:00 and of 10 minutes duration for each visit. This is to occur 7 nights p/w indefinitely.

A complex customer visit schedule may have differing numbers of visits on weekends for example. These might be 30 minutes whereas the mid-week visits might be 15 minutes etc. Extra visits may be required on Bank/Public Holidays and certain visits might need to be at a certain time such as 18:55

Ideally, I would like to log the 'contracted' visits as a standard, repeating schedule but have the ability to jump in and change any number of visits as a one off occurrence or maybe for a period of 3 days, 2 weeks etc.

Also, the security officer on duty would need to see a report/list of 'visits' to perform plus have the ability to 'tick' visits off as and when he completes them. Recording a date and time stamp would also be good.

So, could SeedCode Calendar manage the above without too much trouble?

Thanks
Brian.

Hi Brian,

Sounds like it would work quite well. For one thing, the repeating events in SeedCode Calendar are treated as linked but distinct events, so you can easily grab one instances of a repeating event and nudge or change it. The idea of recording timestamps when a visit is marked "done" is also something very easy in FileMaker generally, and could be applied to the calendar as well.

One way to get a sense of how well this would fit is to enter a busy week into the calendar demo: of course it won't fit your needs exactly as the demo can't be modified, but you'll get a good sense of where the gaps are between what it does out of the box and what you may need.

Hope that helps,

John

Hi John,
Thanks for your reply, I'll start by adding in Monday the 05th Nov duties and will 'repeat' them as necessary for that week along with any odd one-offs.

Re: the repeating events, it doesn't look like I can change a future event and have that change reflected in all events after that date. When amending a repeating event in MS Outlook, we have the choice of editing a single occurrence or ALL occurrences.

Is there a shortcut method to grab an event from one day and 'copy' it to another day?

Thanks
Brian.

Sounds good. A couple thoughts about your questions...

- Since all repetitions in a "chain" are linked by a repeating ID, you can write scripts to manipulate them en masse. We don't have that kind of thing built in though. More on repetitions here: http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... tingEvents

- You can drag an event from one day to another on the week, month, grid, and gantt views. And I've seen people make little "nudge" scripts to move an event to "tomorrow". It's just FileMaker, after all. =)

I took the plunge and bought the Pro version! The 'Replace Field Contents' works fine should we ever need to do a mass update.

Now I just need to work out how to export my test data from the Demo version and import it into the Pro version before experimenting further...

Revisiting this thread as I bought the Pro Calendar last night and have started to work on it by integrating it alongside my file, which is hosted remotely.

Adding all the differing types of visits and their schedules in to the calendar has been relatively straight forward so I'm confident with that aspect of it.

I now need some best practice advice:
When opening my existing database, can I automatically open the Pro calendar in the background?
Should I use a portal to reproduce the Events records on each customer record or link to Pro instead
Could I generate a report using Dates and times? E.g. 05/11/12 17:00 to 06/11/12 05:00

Thanks
Brian.

Congrats Brian; glad it's coming together.

Some specific advice...

- You need to run the calendar's Upon Opening script, but you don't necessarily need to land on the calendar afterwards. Experiment with changing the destination at the end of that script.

- We often see portals to events on our customers' Contact and Project screens. You'll find examples of these portals in the Pro Calendar file you downloaded--on the SampleContacts layout, for example. Those portals also demonstrate how to call up an event from outside the calendar, and how to create one.

- The best reporting tool FileMaker has is the list (or subsummary report), and that's the case here as well. We recommend duplicating the list view as the basis for new reports and then performing date-range searches there to get the report data you need.

Hope that helps,

John

Hi John,
I've added the following to the 'Open' script in my existing file:
Perform Script [ "Upon Opening" from file: "SeedCodeCalendarPRO" ] I now need to add a line to the end of the 'Upon Opening' script to return the user back to the existing file.

I've copied the SampleContacts portal over to my file and redirected the fields and will have a look at the scripts for the buttons next. I'm guessing that I'll have to copy the scripts across too?

Regarding the subsummary report, do you mean duplicate it across to my existing file?

Thanks
Brian.

Hi Brian,

Regarding the sub-summary report, you don't need to copy the Event List layout to your file as it's referencing the same data (events). You can just go to that layout within the Calendar file and find and sort as needed. You can call FileMaker scripts across files, so you could set up a simple script in the calendar file that takes you to the Event List and finds and sorts the appropriate records and then call that script from either file.

brian.curran wrote:I've copied the SampleContacts portal over to my file and redirected the fields and will have a look at the scripts for the buttons next. I'm guessing that I'll have to copy the scripts across too?

Right, it's best to copy the script first, so when you copy over the buttons, they'll find the appropriate scripts. If the script isn't there, then the button will reference <unknon>. However in this case, just redirecting the buttons after the fact shouldn't be a big deal.

hth,
Jason