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Calendar Component

Description

The Calendar Component is a simple yet powerful web component that gives you an events calendar to with 8 different views, a drag and drop interface, easy integration with other components, and easy binding to SQL Databases or DBF.

Discussion

Before you can deploy a web application that has a Calendar Component, you must obtain a license. Unlicensed Calendar Components will only run on localhost and 127.0.0.1.

Start by creating a new calendar component and setting the desired properties.

images/calendar_properties.png

The four critical setup steps are to define and map to a calendar table,

images/define_calendar_table.png

define and map to an events table,

images/define_events_table.png

create an event editing UX Component,

images/component_to_edit_calendar_events.png

and add one or more calendars to the calendar table, either by working directly in the database or by building and using an Alpha Anywhere Grid or UX Component for editing the calendar table.

images/calendar_table_edit.png
The image above is of a component built against a Calendars table with an auto-increment GROUPID field. This is not compatible with the Automatically create new calendar if not found option discussed in the "Dynamically Creating New Records in the Calendars Table" videos.

At that point you can save and run your calendar locally.

images/calendar_preview.png

The calendar currently supports English (EN), French (FR), Italian (IT), and Spanish (SP). The language files can be found in "Javascript\Local" in the Web Project Folder. The filenames are of this form: locale_FR.js. To add additional languages, you can make copies of these files (using a two letter abbreviation for the language code) and then specify the language code in the Calendar builder.

Licensing your calendar

Before you can publish your calendar to a site for general use you will need to buy a license to allow it to run on that site, and enter the license number into the calendar properties. If you do not purchase a calendar license, your calendar will only run on localhost and 127.0.0.1.

Using Calendar Arguments

When launching the Calendar from a Grid or another component, you will want to set one or more of the Calendar's arguments, to control what is displayed dynamically.

images/calendar_arguments.png

Debugging Calendar Serialization

An option in the Calendar Component builder allows you to turn on debugging information.

images/calendar_properties_aedvanced.png

If this option is enabled, debugging information is written to the Trace folder (see the Application Server control panel for information on where the Trace folder is located).

images/application_server_settings_logging_v11.png

Videos

Overview of the Calendar Component

The Calendar component allows you to display 'events' or 'appointments' in a Calendar view. This video gives a quick overview of the features of the Calendar component. In a subsequent video we show how to set up the Calendar component.

Setting up the Calendar Component

This video shows the steps to get started to set up and use a Calendar component in your application.

Dynamically Creating New Records in the Calendars Table

When the Calendar Component is opened, it can be configured to only display the events for a particular calendar.

For example, you might have an 'Employees' table and you might have a Grid which shows the records in the Employees table.

A button in each row of the Grid opens the Calendar Component showing the appointments for that particular Employee. However, if there is no matching record in the Calendar table for the Employee, it would be convenient to automatically create a new record in the Calendars table before opening the Calendar.

This video shows how this is easily done.

Opening the Calendar Component and Showing a Selected List of Calendars

When the Calendar Component is opened from a button in a Grid or UX Component, you can specify which calendars (i.e. the calendar for Dr. Jones, Dr. Smith, etc.) should be shown on the Calendar.

This video shows how you can read the list of calendars to show from a column in the Grid.

Opening the Calendar Component and Showing a List of Related Calendars

Assume that you have a Grid that contains a list of people for which calendars have been defined. When you click a button to open the Calendar Component for a particular person, you would like to see the calendars for 'related' people as well. In addition, you would like the 'related' calendars to be read-only, while the main calendar is updatable.

This video shows how you can define a 'link table' that indicates what the 'related' calendars are for each calendar. For example, whenever the calendar for Dr. Smith (id = 3) is shown, you also want to see the calendars for Dr. Jones (id = 27) and Dr. King (id = 33).

This video shows how this can be done by putting a Linked Content Section in the main Grid. The Linked Content Section shows the Grid based on the 'link table'.