The Display View box

Schedule views are how you control the presentation style of a schedule and/or display just the schedule items you are interested in. To display a temporary ad hoc view of a schedule, click on a to bring up the Display View box. Then fill in what you want to view and click on the Display View button.

You tend to use temporary views in two very different ways:

• During event design, you create view-only schedules from them. For example, if you had a week long rolling event to reserve tennis courts, you might not want people to have to scroll thru a 1000-ish schedule items to find the court they want. If so, you could create 7 view-only schedules, one for each day of the week.
• During an event, you display temporary views according to what you need to see at that time. For example, sometimes you might want to look at all schedule items and at other times just future items.

If you decide a temporary view will be of use to you in the future, make it permanent by clicking on the Save link that is now on the signup page's title line.

Match Criteria

Scheduling Criteria

A view includes the schedule items that match all the entered scheduling criteria: So if none are entered, the full schedule is displayed. Calendar months, grid rows, and grid columns that contain no matches are simply stripped from the display. But if a not-in-view grid cell has to be drawn, an asterisk is displayed in it.

The scheduling criteria you can set:

• Start times(s). For example, if you enter 9AM, items that start at 9AM would match.
• Day(s) of week. For example, if you select Wednesday, items scheduled on any Wednesday in the schedule would match.
• Date(s). For example, if you enter 6/12, items scheduled on June 12 would match.
  Other date formats:
  • You can enter Today-relative days. That is, whenever the criteria is evaluated, it is interpreted relative to whatever day is currently Today. To do this, enter a number: -1 is yesterday, 0 is today, 1 is tomorrow, and so on.
  • You can enter Today-relative months. For example, 0m thru 1m means 1st day of the current month thru the last day of the next month.
  • Setting a date to * sets it to far in the past or future. For example, setting the 1st Item's Date field to 0 and the 2nd to * says to match all items scheduled for today or later.
• Activity info. For example, if you select Warden, only schedule items whose activity is Warden would match. More interestingly, if you select a menu item containing a *, the * matches anything. For example, if you select *,Precinct 1, all schedule items whose activity name ends in Precinct 1 would match.

Notes:

1. If only one field of a date/time row is filled in, the other is set to the same value.
2. If both are filled in, all items in the range match. For example, if you enter both 1PM and 4PM, all schedule items starting anywhere from 1PM to 4PM would match.
3. If an event has sliceable activities, the Start Times row is replaced by an availability-bar-range row. However if you enter just the 1st time in this row, it is processed as if you entered just the first time in the Start Time row.

Item States

(Note: the item state and sliceable-item criteria are n/a to Make Signup Schedule)

Item State matches are based on what signups have been done for the schedule item. User Can Still Signup for It means all not-closed, not-full, ongoing or later items.

A regular item is Full if the number of signups at it has reached its Slots Available limit (which includes its waitlist if applicable). (See the next section for what constitutes a Full sliceable item).

When an admin-created view is used on a self-signup page:

• Not-Full and Can Still Signup are processed as if the Still Available checkbox was set.
• Contains Unapproved Requests and All Item States are the same as not checking this box.

Sliceable-Item Criteria

These criteria control how availability bars are rendered and what constitutes a full sliceable item. A sliceable item is considered full if the largest available chunk in its availability bar is shorter than the current service's duration. If there is no current service, each item's shortest service is used instead. Note that Display View's Show Bookability dropdown menu can be used to set the current service.

An item's availability bar range is set to the item's entire range unless you enter both Time Range to Show fields. You enter both to display a shorter bar. For example, if you are interested in just the morning, set them to 8AM and 12, or the like.

Range-to-show times outside an item's range are ignored. If all of them are outside the item's range, a short red bar is displayed when the item is in your view. (Since such items are considered full, they are not displayed when your view excludes full items).

Display of State-Excluded and Role-Excluded Items

Because a grid row or calendar day shows multiple schedule items, excluded items can be in the scope of what is displayed:

• When a state-excluded item's cell is part of a grid, the unzoomed cell displays a dimmed and smaller version of what it would normally display.
• When a state-excluded item is in a zoom or when a role-excluded* item is in a self-signup zoom, zoom "unhides" the item. It also gives the item a gray background, and if a sliceable item, shows its full availability bar.

*(Some groups only allow people to signup for certain schedule items. An item a person cannot signup for is called role-excluded. And zoom works as described to allow users to see all their co-workers).

Schedule Presentation

Layout to Show

The List layouts are good for smaller or irregular schedules. The Grid layouts are good for dense, repetitive schedules (e.g. reserving tennis courts). The Calendar layouts can help you see the big picture, particularly in long schedules with at most a few schedule items per day.

More specifically, Layout controls how activity names on a signup page are arranged. In the List layouts, each schedule item is one row of a table. You can choose one overall alphabetical list, or one table per day, activity location, or activity project. In the Grid layouts, each schedule item is one cell of a table, and each row contains items with a single date/time. You can choose one overall table, or you can choose to have one table per activity location. In the Calendar layouts, monthly calendars are shown, and you can choose to emphasize different aspects of the schedule:

• You can use no color coding.

  (Since color-coding supplants normal schedule coloring (e.g. highlighting of new signups), choose this option if you need the normal info or your schedule would need too many colors).

• You can make the base name of each activity a different color.
• You can make the location of each activity a different color.

  (If you choose this option, location-less activities are all colored off-white).

• You can make each signed up person have her own color.

  (Such colors are shown in zoomed schedule items only if an admin has setup permanent colors).

Signups to Show

This only applies to admin-signup pages. A setting of New Signups shows recently created or edited signups: up to 24 hours old for completed signups and up to 72 hours old for unapproved requests. A setting of Pending/Ready Signups shows signups with just these 2 status's.

Pending/Ready Signups displays signups in the order the user created them. The other options display signups alphabetically — but with Pending signups at the end. These orderings apply both unzoomed and zoomed.

TOP-Row Links

These enable you to get to the desired portion of the schedule with one click. If you do not want to waste the space for the TOP row (or whatever), select the No TOP Row option.

The Automatic option is the default and works as follows:

• Calendars always have Month links.
• Activities Listed by Date and Grid of Act Names vs Times have Month links if the view has more than 20 weeks; Week links if more than 20 days; and Day links otherwise.
• Activities Listed by Location and Grid per Location always have Location links, and their max length is 25 letters.

The Automatic policy also applies if the current option does not apply to the current layout. Example1: if you have a by-location layout, the Day, Week, and Month options do not apply. Example2: if you have a calendar layout, all but Month are not applicable.

The other options, when applicable, work as follows:

• Month, Week, and Day force periods of that size.
• Max 10, Max 15, Max 20 cause long locations to be truncated to that length.
• If a small period is used with a long schedule, even a big screen will end up with a top row that wraps to more than 1 line.

When locations in the top row are truncated, the letters before their last Space are stripped whenever multiple truncated locations would be the same. For example, when max is 10, South Precinct 1 and South Precinct 2 would be truncated to South Pre..1 and South Pre..2.

If the first period of a schedule consists of location-less activities or planning activities, there is no good way to name this period. So it has no link, and you use the TOP link to display it. On the other hand, if the top row truly has only 1 period, a link to the end of the schedule is appended.

Some unusual actions change the periods in a schedule in a way that cannot be easily reflected. When this occurs, you need to refresh the web page to see the new top row.

Saving a Temporary View

Ways to Save a View

The Save box gives you these choices:

• You can update the schedule that the current view was derived from.
• You can create/name a public view-only schedule, and set its level of visibility.
• You can create/name a personal view-only schedule — that is, one that will only be available to you.
• (Note: public views and personal admin views are copied when you do a Copy Event command).

To display descriptions of all the schedules the current event has, click on Top-level menus->Left MORE->Manage Schedules.

Presentation Order of an Event's Schedules

An event's schedules are listed on Self-Signup Home and on signup pages. In these lists, they are ordered as follows: all public-schedule names and then all personal-schedule names. Within each category, schedules are ordered alphabetically by their "raw names". A schedule's raw name is the name you enter when you create a schedule. (Actual schedules are created on Make Signup Schedule, and view-only schedules are created via Save Temporary View).

Raw Name vs Presented Name

There are two ways the presented name of a schedule can differ from the name it was given when it was created:

• If you start the raw name with char colon, the presented name will not include either. The char is usually a letter or digit. You create such prefixes when you want to list schedules in a specific non-alphabetical order. For example, you could prefix the name you want first with 0:, the 2nd with 1:, and so on.
• If a view is today-relative value (i.e. a number in either Item's Date field), you can give it a dynamic name. To do this, put one or more of DW1, DW2, MD1, and MD2 in its raw name. DW1 inserts the day-of-week of a view's 1st date in the presented name, and DW2 does the same for its 2nd date. Similarly MD1 and MD2 insert the month and day of the respective date. (Recall that entering date1, blank is the same as entering date1, date1).

  If a date field (say Date2) is not today-relative and you put DW2 or MD2 in the view's raw name, the symbol remains in its presented name. Thus if you put any of these symbols in a view's name and only then go to make the view today-relative, the dynamic date info will not be shown until you save the temporary view.

Presentation-Order Example

Recall the Court Reservation example above; it had today-relative view-only schedules that each displayed one day. To present the "day after tomorrow" in time-order, even when a week is spread over 2 months, you would:

• Set its 1st date to 2 (i.e the 2nd day after whatever day is currently today).
• Set its name to 2: DW1, MD1 so that it appears after the schedules named 0:Today and 1:Tomorrow.

If today was Tuesday Jan 30, this would lead to this schedule's presented name being Thursday, Feb 1.

Managing an Event's Signup Schedules

This page lists all the schedules the current event has. From it, you can:

• Show a schedule, or a temporary view thereof (). This displays your admin-signup page.
• Change a schedule's properties, such as its name or visibility. (Note that you can make a public view-only schedule private and vice versa).
• Copy a view-only schedule. This makes a copy of it in the indicated event.
• Delete a schedule. If it is an actual schedule, this will delete its schedule items too.

Showing a temporary view is often used to display an ad hoc view of a schedule. It is also the 1st step in creating new view-only schedules. For example, suppose you have a week-at-a-time rolling event for tennis court reservations. Further suppose you want your users to be able to choose (with 1 click) which day's court slots to display. To achieve this, you would do the following 7 times:

• Click on the , enter a 1-day match criteria, and click on Display View to display this view on your admin-signup page.
• After the temporary view is displayed, click on its Save link.
• Then click on the Create Public Schedule radio button, set the dropdown menu to All Signup Pages, enter an appropriate schedule name, and click on the Save View button.

Now all 7 schedules will appear in the Schedules column on everyone's Self-Signup Home.

Note:

1. Your personal schedules are listed in green, and the rest in blue.
2. You cannot delete the last actual schedule of an event.
3. Copying a schedule view that has "lots" of match criteria is useful only if the two events have "similar" actual schedules. Otherwise using the schedule in the new event will always result in a "No Matching Items" message.