Appointment Management Features
An Appointment or Event is any activity your end-users will insert and view within the calendar. Appointments include numerous options related to its visual representation on-screen and layout within timelines. You don't have to worry about a single thing when implementing basic features since they are provided directly to your end-users without you having to write a single line of code. As is the case with all of our products, you can easily tailor appointments to the application’s specifications since appointment appearance, layout and functionality can be customized in a variety of ways.
All appointment dialogs can be fully customized and extended with the use of additional controls and features (you can even use your own forms), allowing you to deliver the capabilities expected by your end-users.
Appointment Display
The appointment display form shipped within the DevExpress XtraScheduler™ Suite behaves much like the Microsoft© Outlook© Appointment Editor. Your end-users can determine an event's content, importance, type, start and end times in all view types. The following features are available to you when displaying appointments:
- 4 Built-in Time Display (Status) Options
Additional time display options can be added via the DevExpress Scheduler Storage Component. (Screenshot) - 11 Built-in Coloring Types (Labels)
Indicates the type and or importance of a given event. In addition to status options, you can add any number of custom labels. (Screenshot) - Built-in Icons
Used to highlight recurring appointments and appointments with reminders. - Automatic Hints (Tooltips)
Tooltips are used to display an appointment’s start and end time along with its caption. - Start and End Date Indicators
The Scheduler uses special icons (arrows and labels) for appointments that cannot be fully displayed within the current view. - Text Customization
The ability to modify displayed text for individual events and appointments. - Custom Images
The ability to display unique images for individual events. - Custom Draw
The ability to draw custom text, appointment backgrounds and borders. - Custom Tooltips
Tooltips can be customized to provide additional information for the selected appointment.
Appointment Layout
With the DevExpress XtraScheduler™, you are never limited to the display of consecutive events or appointments of a limited duration – The XtraScheduler™ allows you to incorporate multiple event layouts - from overlapping events to multi-day events - with customizable start and end times. Regardless of layout type used, appointments are arranged automatically so that users can quickly determine when an event starts and how long it lasts. The following event arrangement options ship with the DevExpress WinForms Scheduler Suite:
- Overlapping Events
Day view can display an unlimited number of overlapping appointments - automatically arranging them based upon start time and duration.
- All-Day Events
Day view displays all-day events above the timeline - this also includes displaying multi-day events continuously across multiple dates.
- All-day Events in Week Views
Week and multi-week views display all-day and multi-day events at the top of the day (starting with the longest). Events that completely fit into this day are displayed at the bottom in chronological order.
Appointment Editing Forms
By default, end-users can invoke an easy-to-use standard appointment editing form.
For recurring appointments, our scheduling control provides a dialog that allows end-users to associate recurrence patterns for appointments. (Screenshot) Note that you can customize the content, layout and functionality of all built-in editing forms. This may be necessary when implementing solutions involving custom appointment fields which contain arbitrary information. See the Customizable Dialogs page for more information.
Custom In-Place Editor
By default, end-users have two options for appointment editing. They can either invoke an editing dialog or edit an appoitment's subject using an in-place editor. Of course there are end-users that demand something in between. Subject editing is often not enough and Microsoft® Outlook® dialogs have too many options. A compromise solution is to implement a custom editor form and use this form as an in-place editor for appointments. This means that end-users will see your custom form instead of a simple subject editor. This will take place when they press F2, repeatedly click an appointment or when they start typing within the calendar to create a new appointment. Needless to say, the custom form will be automatically resized to fit the appointment being edited.
Restricting End-User Modifications
You can easily prevent end-users from editing (copy, delete, drag and drop) an appointment. Moreover, you can intercept these actions taken for a particular appointment, and provide a custom action instead.
Appointment Splitting
The XtraScheduler allows end-users to split an appointment in two by simply dragging a splitter line. This feature is extremely useful if you need to break a recurring appointment into two separate series. All you have to do is select the Split command from the appointment's context menu, drag the splitter to the required time and click the left mouse button. The following illustrations show a Scheduler before and after a split operation is applied to a recurring appointment. The series is split into two independent series of recurring appointments, the end time of the first series being equal to the start time of the next series. Before
After
When dragging the splitter, the scheduler shows a tooltip that indicates the split time along with the splitter targeting precision. The precision is set automatically based on the appointment's duration and varies from one hour to one minute. End-users can adjust this value using the mouse wheel. The following images describe the Appointment Splitter in different Scheduler views: Example: How to use an appointment split tool
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