Reoccurrence at different times

[Jasper]

Hi,

Your plugin is great. Just implemented and will buy the pro version tomorrow. I miss one feature, or I don’t know how to use it. My customer organises trainings. The same event (read: course) can be given on several different days, but also the first week starting in the morning, while another date starts in the afternoon. In the database schema you implemented time and date-specific reoccurrency, but not in the interface. Or did I miss that? Will this be implemented?

Thanks, Jasper

[Stephen Harris]

HI Jasper,

I’m glad you like the plug-in :), You’re right that the database scheme does support date/time specific re-currency but this isn’t supported by the plug-in (although potentially possible). There’s a number of reasons for this:

1. A user interface that handles this well is a massive hurdle.
2. Pro implicitly assumes an occurrence can be identified by a date (e.g. when selling tickets “by date”, the bookee is required to select the date they are booking for). On the front-end this is used to identify which occurrence is being booked by listening for which date is selected by the user.
3. Admin-side Pro allows you to select which occurrences a ticket is available for (again when selling by date). This again uses a datepicker.
4. iCal doesn’t support this kind of recurrence (unless you just use explicitly list all occurrences)

There is nothing that makes it impossible (that I can think of), but it is difficult. So it’s not a feature that is planned any time soon unfortunately.

It should be noted that currently the API prevents occurrences from being created with different times. That is, if you use eo_insert_event() all occurrences will have the same time. In particular, the time part of includes is ignored.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 1 month ago by  Stephen Harris.

[jappievw]

Thanks Stephen for your very clear answer. It is very detailed and makes a lot of sense. Short reflection from my side:

1. The user interface is a point of discussion indeed. The input of the current date selection rocks. However, for my customer it is already hard to see in an overview, without diving into the calendar, to see which dates are selected. Only for the custom reoccurrence it makes sense to show a list of dates (and times) which have been selected.
2. What if we still allow one time on a specific date, this would help tremendously, isn’t it?
3. Same like two I think.
4. The custom type of reoccurrence is also hard with iCal isn’t it?

Is it possible to develop such behaviour specifically for the custom reoccurrence type on freelance base?

[Jasper van Wanrooy]

Hi Stephen, did you see any opportunity to check my previous reply? Thanks!

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Jasper,

Apologies, I didn’t notice your previous post.

1. You can already see an overview of dates using the ‘add/remove occurrences’ button which displays an datepicker which highlights the dates of the event (and add/remove dates). I think you’re right in that might be best to only allow custom times with the ‘custom’ recurrence – particular in view of iCal specifications.

2/3. Yes it would 🙂 – and maybe the best route to go down.

4. Yes and no. The iCal specification allows you to list dates to include/exclude from a recurrence schedule, and there’s nothing wrong with simply using include to list additional dates. However they are only dates and inherit the time from the event’s start time (DTSTART).

[Michael Lemken]

Hi Stephen,

sad to read this, but the feature that you can put different start/end times to a certain event is crucial for me and I would pay 40 Pounds only for that, because I don’t sell tickets for events, I just report them.
E.g. On saturday they play “Carmen” at 19:30, on Sunday on 18:00. And the different opening times of museums and galleries…

Greetings
Michael

[Author]

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