Poor calendar in Aware. Why?

Jaymer

Is the Kendo calendar widget a dog?
or is it just that Aware has never treated it like its an important UI piece?

Jaymer

Post your calendar issues below...

Jaymer

Limited to only displaying the Subject field in a cell. And cannot be HTML. Cannot make a formula to build this in calendar, so you have to use BO rules to stuff whatever you want to display into the Subject field.
If I allow Editing / Resizing - but NOT delete, why can the user click anywhere on a date and a popup appears to create a new record? I don't want that. Confusing to users.

joben

Jaymer wrote
Limited to only displaying the Subject field in a cell. And cannot be HTML. Cannot make a formula to build this in calendar, so you have to use BO rules to stuff whatever you want to display into the Subject field.

Regarding this, we face the same problems in some of our apps when we want some bells and whistles for the calendar events. If I remember correctly, we can't even get a line break to work, so this is a real issue. The subject field is sanitized so all HTML tags are being stripped. I just wanted to give a quick tip that might be helpful for some people: Emojis actually work here. (Use Win + dot if you are on Windows)
It means a calendar subject can contain stuff like:

🟥🟩🟦 Acme Inc - 🔨💥 Roadrunner Road 123

You can use the emoji color squares in combination with update rules as a way of tagging, which looks similar to the Outlook calendar.
This, combined with presentation rules (background color etc) is where the customization options seem to end.

hpl123

Jaymer wrote
Is the Kendo calendar widget a dog?
or is it just that Aware has never treated it like its an important UI piece?

I think it's the latter and I am 1+ for a better calendar (or rather more options etc. in the Kendo calendar, timelines etc.)

Jaymer

https://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/scheduler/index
From the EDIT menu, you can edit in DOJO

there's this code in the demo:

<script id="event-template" type="text/x-kendo-template">
    <div class="template-container">
        # if (image != "") { #
        <img src="#= image #" style="height:25px; width: 25px;">
        # } #
        <h5 class="template-title-#= resources[0].value #">event<br>title</h4>
    </div>
</script>

and some CSS near the bottom to tweak.

I think I saw a render script example long time ago - if you could replace Vlad's template with a custom one, using the render script, then you could override the standard stuff. You could redefine the classes for styling inside a date cell, even use a field other than "Subject"... like one thats NOT sanitized and has more html formatting inside it.

Some of the other things look the same - like the default event editor.
But the (supposed) bug I have with clicking on a random date and a CREATE popup appearing doesn't happen in the demo... so thats possible.

But it doesn't look like Kendo offers "a ton" more functionality than what we have now... not one of their better components, I'd say.

Jaymer

This will turn off the snapping of events to the boundaries - will allow much easier dragging and placement of an event

    $(":checkbox").change(function(e) {
        var scheduler = $("#scheduler").data("kendoScheduler");

    scheduler.options.snap = this.checked;
    scheduler.view(scheduler.view().name);
});

I just need to find some existing render script examples for how to integrate this exactly in Aware.

Gabbitas

My biggest bugbear with the scheduler (timeline views) is speed. It seems soooo slow. Does anyone else have this issue?

For example, if I have 6 staff members all with 1 appointment each per day then it can take 30 to 40 seconds to load the month view. I have some special 6 month and year views that Vlad helped me to integrate and if 6 staff members have 1 appointment per day it takes up to 5 mins to display in the browser.

What could make it so slow? I’ve tried optimising my rules associated with the appointment object but to no avail. Are the rules even the issue? Are they even executed when showing appointments on a scheduler?

I read in other places that Kendo scheduler is slow to render but don’t know if to my extent is normal

customaware

I have this type of Scheduler in my HR / Payroll App....

This screen is for 260 Employees.....

Takes about 20 seconds to load... Is a lot of data.

Check if you have any referenced Presentation Rules on any of the Attributes... I changed mine to only use attributes in each actual record. Made a huge difference.

aware_support

Item rules can slow the calendar down, especially if these rules use references and/or shortcuts (although 8.7 have some improvements in this area)

Most (or possibly all) other problems can be solved by scripts attached to a calendar query

Gabbitas

Thanks Mark and Support.

I have followed what you have said and looked to see if there are any referenced presentation rules (Item Display Rules) and that none of them refer to any shortcuts or referenced attributes. I do have item display rules but they only refer to attributes of the appointment object itself so the problem doesn't lie there.

Time to run a couple of tests.....

I ran the scheduler in the operation mode and run a timer to see how long it would take to load. It took 2 mins 24 seconds. That's around 1800 appointments to load and display.

I looked again at all of my 'Business Rules' within the Appointment object. I have a lot of rules in there, more than 100, so I found some more ways to optimise them to avoid them firing unnecessarily and ended up at a point where no rules should fire unless the Appointment was either new or had been changed in some way by a user. This made a slight difference and brought the load time down to around 2 mins.

Next I wondered what would happen if I turned off all business rules in the appointment object and so I went through and disabled each and every rule.

I ran the scheduler again and it loaded in around 20 seconds! Amazing!

So now the question I have is why are business rules seemingly being evaluated or slowing down the loading of the scheduler? Surely business rules do not need to be considered or invoked when just displaying the results of a query as I assume that's all that is happening in the background? If all of my business rules have conditions then I guess the slowness in load time is caused purely by evaluation of the conditions of the rules and not the execution of the actions of the rules themselves as they shouldn't even get to a point of action execution.

How can I fix this or work around this or is this a "bug"?

Thanks

Jaymer

post several pics of your rules

aware_support

How many protection rules do you have there? Protection rules can slow down a query. If you are running 8.7 there is a way to prevent protection rules from being evaluated when running a query.

tford

If you are running 8.7 there is a way to prevent protection rules from being evaluated when running a query.

Is that by a setting in the query?

aware_support

No, using the IN FORMS key:

PROTECT IN FORMS Object.Attribute FROM...

Gabbitas

Yes I have 10 protection rules. That's what's has been causing the slow load!

I have now re-enabled all rules on the appointment object and added the IN FORMS key to the protection rules and now all is well. 1800 appointment's loaded in around 20 seconds. 2 seconds would be better but we don't live in a perfect world 😉 very happy now 😃 😃

Thank you support and everyone for their input. Thanks Jaymer for sparking the conversation with the original post

Jhstephenson

I am curious...

Where in the documentation is something like 'PROTECT IN FORMS...' discussed?

Jaymer

its brand new in last couple of builds, FYI.
only saw it mentioned in release notes.