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Calendar Display

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:28 am
by wkadams
In the month view, some of our events are indented. I have attached a screen shot with a couple of examples circled. Is there any significance to the indenting and/or any way we can avoid this. Thanks

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 8:20 am
by aebrown
wkadams wrote:In the month view, some of our events are indented. I have attached a screen shot with a couple of examples circled. Is there any significance to the indenting and/or any way we can avoid this. Thanks

There is no significance to the indenting -- it is a minor display bug. It happens in Month view whenever there is an all-day event that includes a location (so that there is a building icon) and another event for that date (so that an event is displayed immediately below that all-day event). That other event (the one immediately below the all-day event that has a building icon) will be slightly indented by the width of the building icon.

There's nothing you can do about it, except to avoid scheduling buildings for all-day events. As I glanced at your calendar, it seems to me that you have a lot of all-day events that use buildings where I have to wonder why a building is included with the event. For example, "Fast Sunday", "New Year's Day", "Family Home Evening", "MLK Day". In fact, I find it hard to come up with a reasonable scenario where any all-day event would use a building, except perhaps a case where the FM group is cleaning the building all day. If you're using a building, you should be more precise in specifying the actual times the building is used.

But in any case, a minor adjustment to the CSS would fix this bug. That has been reported by someone else (but I can't find the post right now). I'm guessing the problem wasn't found during testing because it is such an odd case to schedule a building with an all-day event. That doesn't mean the bug shouldn't be fixed, but I imagine it's a low priority.

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:52 pm
by wkadams
Hi aebrown

Thanks for the reply. I suspected that the indenting was some kind of bug. I have just had some people ask if it means anything.

I also appreciate your remarks on scheduling locations for all day events. One of the problems we have is that we have little insight into what is coming down the line in these programs so we act on what we have. Most of our Stake scheduling was done using V1. In fact, V2 came out the day before our calendar review. Needless to say, it caused some scrambling on our part and adjustment where things didn't carry over correctly. But we made it through. One of the features in V1 was the ability to select "events without location". We thought that was a pretty nice feature. So in order to make it easy, we devised a plan to assign every event a location. Doing that allowed us to look at the "event with location" list expecting it to be empty. If is wasn't empty, then we knew to take care of the event. In order to do this, we created a Misc Facility. Assignable "rooms" at this misc facility were things like the Temple, Bishop Storehouse, Holiday, and several other things. Using this strategy allowed us to assign a location to every event including all day events but not get in the way of fully utilizing our regular buildings. This quickly identified from the "events without a location" list events we needed to resolve. With the distributive scheduling (which I like) we had many who didn't know or mostly forget to choose a location. We could quickly identify those and avoid conflicts.

Then came V2 and that went away. However, all of our events had locations and that is what you are seeing. I am concerned that in V2 there is not a clean a way to identify events without a location but need one. For example, if someone at a Ward schedules an event but doesn't choose a location, I don't know anywhere that shows up except on the Ward calendar. I don't believe building schedulers who are not in the same Ward have a clue that there is an event sitting out there without a location but needs one. So there is no one that can provide any oversight to avoid a potential conflict. The person who scheduled the event but forgot a location thinks everything is fine. However, there is nothing stopping someone from scheduling an event at the same time and choosing a location which will conflict with the assumed location of the first event. I think there is a potential for two groups to show up at the same location with one scheduled and the other assumed. If you have a good way to avoid this, let me know. I know the answer can be we just need to provide training and that is true and we have done that. But it is still easy to forget to choose a location. I wish they would bring back the "events without a location" feature. Any ideas you have would be welcome.

Thanks again and Happy New Year

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 1:18 pm
by russellhltn
wkadams wrote:However, there is nothing stopping someone from scheduling an event at the same time and choosing a location which will conflict with the assumed location of the first event.
I believe they will see a warning about a "possible" conflict. So I think they will have a clue, but they won't be prevented from scheduling their event.

wkadams wrote:I think there is a potential for two groups to show up at the same location with one scheduled and the other assumed.

I think there's a risk that someone will forget to schedule their event on the calendar. How was that handled before?

There's also the risk that someone won't select all the resources they need.

At the end of the day, I think you have to take the harsh stand that if they forget to schedule the room, they don't have it. There's a limit to how much you can protect them from themselves.

Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:54 pm
by wkadams
Thanks for the reply. I agree that someone scheduling an event will get a possible conflict notice but unless they are in the same unit can't see anything about the possible conflict. When I said without a clue I was referring to building schedulers who don't schedule events unless they are doing double duty as a unit scheduler.

I also agree that we can't protect against everything. However, the time and place of the event is not the time to find out about a conflict if it can be avoided. Typically at the time of the event there would be no one to arbitrate and perhaps no access to the calendar. So it is pretty awkward. The "events without a location" feature of V1 helped avoid some of the possible conflicts. It didn't help if the right room(s) were not selected. But the system knows which events don't have a location selected and it would be nice to make that known to the users.