Recurrence rule issues

[Jered]

Hi, I'm an ICT manager in the World Health Organization. We haven't directly purchased the Telerik Scheduler control but another company (ESI) has used it in implementing a project for us. It's pretty good in some respects, but the recurrence rule parsing has more holes than Swiss cheese! In searching through your forums I can see some of them have been reported to you and apparently you haven't done anything about them. For example, events scheduled to recur once every second week recur once a week instead. This has been reported to you twice:

http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/bi-weekly-recurrence-not-working-correctly-using-expandrecurrence-function.aspx
http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/error-while-using-expandrecurrence-function-from-production-sql-server.aspx

But you redirected those threads to another thread that addresses a completely different issue, here:

http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/recurrencerule-and-timezoneoffset.aspx

Anybody looking to do a serious number of recurrences with your software will be very disappointed. Sometimes recurrences show up in the day view but not the week and month view, or visa versa...

My recommendation: in addition putting some work into fixing the many problems with recurrence parsing, I recommend that you disable the "no end date" option to force users to choose either an end date or a number of occurrences, then save a separate database entry for each occurrence, linking them with a recurrence ID. Your competitors do this with much better results.

[Plamen]

Hi Jered,

We inspected the problem once again and found what seems to be the reason.

The issue is caused by a bug in the Recurrence editor. The problem is that even if you change the first day of week the recurrence editor disregards this information and creates the rule as with the default first day of week (which is Sunday in RadScheduler).
We have logged it for fixing.

This same problem (as pointed in the 2 forum threads that you posted) is actually reproducable in Outlook, too, if first day is also Sunday. But the bug that we have is not present there, meaning that changing of the first day of week property is considered when creating new recurrence rules.

Hope this answer will explain well to you what seems to be the problem.

Thank you for reporting this to our team and  for your observations and suggestions. We will have them in mind.


Kind regards,
Plamen Zdravkov
the Telerik team

[Minculescu]

My solution/workaround was to set the FirstDayOfWeek property of the Recurrence Rule Editor (for this we have to use the advanced form template: http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/examples/advancedformtemplate/defaultcs.aspx). The FirstDayOfWeek property should be "Monday" on the Scheduler. 

<telerik:RadSchedulerRecurrenceEditor runat="server" ID="AppointmentRecurrenceEditor" FirstDayOfWeek='<%# Owner.FirstDayOfWeek %>'/>

Then the appointments that are created are saved and displayed well. For the existing appointments, I had to modify the recurrence rules from the database, adding 'WKST=MO' after the "BYDAY" part and before the "EXDATE" part(if that exists).
Another problem that I found is that setting the FirstDayOfWeek property on the Scheduler, doesn't change the display of the calendars or the list of days from the Recurrence Rule Editor. For the calendars, based on this post, I've added FirstDayOfWeek='<%# Owner.FirstDayOfWeek %>' to the RadCalendar with the "SharedCalendar" ID  and the following code to the page containing the Scheduler: 

protected void RadScheduler1_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
       RadCalendar popupCalendar = RadScheduler1.FindControl("SelectedDateCalendar") as RadCalendar;
       popupCalendar.FirstDayOfWeek = FirstDayOfWeek.Monday;
   }

The issue that the days on the RadSchedulerRecurrenceEditor are listed always starting with "Sunday" still remains.

If would be nice if setting the FirstDayOfWeek on the Scheduler would be enough for everything to function as expected.

[Plamen]

Hi Minculescu,

 
Yes indeed synchronization of FirstDayOfWeek property is a know issue and we already 
 have it in the do to list in some of the future release of RadControls.

Please excuse us for this inconvenience.

Regards,
Plamen
Telerik