Adding some sanity to recurring appointments

[Stuart Hemming]

Someone once said something like "... write a foolproof application and God will invent a better fool."

Whoever it was, he wasn't wrong.

I know I can (and will have to) write custom validation to do this, but it strikes me that it's something that should/could be built-in to the Scheduler, at the very least, as an option under the developer's control.

The better class of fool can:

1. Create an all day appointment with hourly recurrence
2. Create occurrences with no end date.

OK, 1 is a specific example of a general case where our fool can create a recurring appointment where the recurrence interval is less than the event duration.

2. Is, I know, by design. But our fool is apt to just accept the defaults and if he creates an hourly recurring appointment and does nothing else, well, you know the results, I'm sure.

What I'd like to see in the Scheduler are options to:

1. hide selected recurrence intervals (hourly, daily, etc)
2. within each recurrence interval, hide selected options (eg. daily - every weekday)
3. hide selected "recurrence end criteria" (eg "No End Date")
4. set defaults for selected "recurrence end criteria" (eg, After x occurrences; x = 5)
5. select a "recurrence end criteria" as the default
6. automatically validate cases where the recurrence interval <= appointment duration.

As I say, I'd love to see these in the control, but I imagine that I'm going to have to do the work to try and outwit my fool for sometime to come.

However, if any one out there has already met my fool and written something to try and head him off, I'd be really grateful if you'd be prepared to share your code.

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Stuart

[Stuart Hemming]

The really disappointing thing is, examining the RrecurrenceEditor control in VS shows that all of the properties I need to change are there, just [fx: sob] not public.

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Stuart

[Peter]

Hi Stuart,

I agree it is reasonable to provide a built-in validation support for the recurrence options. I will log your suggestion and we will consider it.

Thank you for your thoughtful input.

Greetings,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Stuart Hemming]

Is there anything I can do in the short term?

I've struggled to find a way of selecting some of these controls n jQuery to hide/set them, but if you guys have any tips that might get me some way down this road, I'd love to hear 'em. Specifically, I can get by - short-term - with implementing a form of items 3, 4 & 5 in my original list.

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Stuart

[Peter]

Yes, you can hide certain recurrence editor options by Handling FormCreated ->scroll down to the section on Make changes in the recurrence editor.


Kind regards, Peter
the Telerik team

[Stuart Hemming]

Thanks Peter,

I've managed to set the bar considerably higher for our fool.

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Stuart