Confused by recurring appointments

[tazzmaxx]

I am confused that if I create a recurring appointment that the appointments are not created as separate records. It appears that the system is making note of the recurrence pattern in a separate table and displaying the results in the calendar object. Unfortunately, these appointment objects do not exist and cannot be altered without changing the entire record.

If a user sets an appointment with a recurrence value of weekly every monday, tuesday and wednesday and the appoint has a staff member assigned to it the system will generate all of the appointments on the calendar but if you need to assign different staff members (in no particular order) to the calendar events then the data is only modified on the original appointment record. This is also not useful when attempting to display the data in a regular query as there is nothing that will display the total appointment records or the recurrence pattern that has been selected on an individual appointment record.

With this style of recurring records the records do not exist and therefore cannot be modified individually. Is there a way to select a pattern and also have the system generate the records so that there is a unique record created for each event?

I also noticed in my test environment that the beginning and ending dates start in the following format:

11/12/2009 08:00:00 AM

but are changed to the following format after a recurrence pattern is selected:

11/12/109 08:00:00 AM

The format being used on these attributes is MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss a

[aware_support]

This is true that Aware IM does not create records for recurring appointments but it doesn't need to. You CAN modify an existing recurring appointment in the calendar and Aware IM should ask you if you want to modify the recurring pattern or an individual appointment only. If you choose to modify an individual appointment, this particular appointment WILL appear as an independent record.

[tazzmaxx]

How would you suggest that I create a schedule to provide to a user to send to a printer for appointments that don't exist in anything but a calendar?

From what I can tell this would be impossible with the current architecture.

[aware_support]

You would need a "print calendar" feature that is on our TODO list or print from the calendar. You cannot do this using an ordinary query.

There is no way we would create records for recurring appointments that have no end date!

[tazzmaxx]

Fair enough. Is there a way via a process that logic could be used to create actual records for the events? We use the appointment objects extensively for things other than simple appointments and have plenty of reference objects that cannot exist as a single item that keeps getting updated. They must be separate.

The printing of a calendar is very clunky and wouldn't be acceptable especially in situations were there are more than the allowable events displayed on the calendar or overlapping appointments.

Also, is the problem I mentioned in the initial post something that can be fixed. Currently the dates automatically get updated the wrong format and will not allow me to save the record.

See below:

Starts as the following:

11/12/2009 08:00:00 AM

but the date is changed to the following format after a recurrence pattern is selected:

11/12/109 08:00:00 AM

The format being used on these attributes is MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss a

[aware_support]

The problem with dates is a mystery. Some other user reported this as well but we cannot reproduce it!

Do you have a BSV? Can you describe exactly what you are doing - step-by-step? Also what browser is this?

[tazzmaxx]

The format for both the end time and start time is the following:

MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss a

The browser I was using for the tests was Firefox version 3.5.5

Steps to reproduce:

1. I click on an existing event and it displays with the correct date and time.

2. I then click on the recurrence button on the form and apply the recurrence pattern

3. When I am taken back to the page the date for both the start and end times have been changed to the wrong format

Please consider giving users the ability to create individual records for the recurring events (even if by a process) once the recurrence pattern is applied as it is useless to us and other users (I'm assuming) if you cannot manage the records separately and print or view the records in a grid or export via Excel.

Thanks

[Bryan]

I have a couple of questions with regard to the recurring appointments.

It seems that I cannot delete a future appointment without wiping out the entire appointment group. It would make more sense to me if I could for example delete just one entry or all future entries. An example of this need would be if you had a meeting scheduled for every Thursday for the next 52 weeks but the meeting was canceled for this coming week. You should be able to delete just the one entry for this week without affecting all other appointment objects in this group.

Also, using the example of the meeting from above is it possible to attach a document to the meeting setup for say 3 weeks from now and make it only applicable to that meeting?

One last thing I have run into is that the ability to add recurring appointment is only available in the calendar. We have a couple of locations in our application that are showing dates via the grid. It would make sense for the users to be able to add recurring appointments from these locations without having to move to a different location to do so.

Thanks

[aware_support]

Date corruption problem has been fixed in build 1269

[Bryan]

Bump

[aware_support]

You should be able to delete an individual recurring appointment without having to delete all of them. When you delete an appointment, Aware IM should ask you whether to delete the recurrence or an individual appointment, but you have to delete from the calendar.

[Bryan]

You are correct. If I choose to delete a recurrence then I am prompted. I guess that brings up another question from a compliance perspective. If the users are given the ability to delete past appointments and we cannot access the recurrent objects in the form of a BO then we have no way to audit this deletion or for that matter, correct an issue when someone deletes the entire recurrence instead of just the one entry.

Is there a way to reference the recurrent appointment object in the form of a business object for rule creation?

Also, it seems that if I have a recurrence item that takes place over the course of 6 months once per week and the user wanted to remove the last three months. They would have to manually remove each weeks entry to avoid losing all of the historical data.

[aware_support]

If a user wants to delete the last 3 months, he just has to modify the recurrence parameters and modify the end date!

There is no way at the moment to attach rules to recurring instances.