Resource mapping with Exchange

[Hans Santens]

Hi,

I have added a RadScheduler to my page, which loads several calendars from exchange. To realize that I used your Live Demo/Exchange example. Until now, this works fine.

As the calendars I'm reading from are meeting rooms, I would like to view them as resources. In another thread I have read the following: The mailboxes can be mapped to RadScheduler resources in the CreateAppointmentsFromCalendarItem method. You should inspect the mailbox of the calendar item and assign a corresponding resource.

I had a look in the code, but I don't seem to get this working. Does someone have a working example for this? I can't imagine that I'm the only one who wants to realize something like this.

Many thanks in advance!

[Hans Santens]

I did some further research, and noticed the "resources" property of my Exchange CalendarItemType objects is always empty. Is that normal, or would it be possible that something went wrong at the meeting rooms implementation?

I have started a thread on an msdn forum about this. Let's hope they can give me some explanations. 

[Peter]

Hi Hans,

I am sending you an extended ExchangeSchedulerProvider class that has resources (rooms) added to the appointments.

I hope you find it helpful.


All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team

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[Hans Santens]

Thank you very much! That's exactly what I needed.

[Brad]

Is this something that will be added in future versions or should everyone who wants to use resources with Exchange calendars need to download this file?

[Peter]

Hi Brad,

We don't plan to add any additional built-in functionality related to the exchange provider for RadScheduler. The attached demo project simply shows how to use the existing RadScheduler API to implement a custom scenario.

Regards,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Hans Santens]

Hi,

I know it's quite an old thread, started by myself,  by I just wanted to add something which might be useful to some of you...

There is an easy way to make the ExchangeSchedulerProvider more generic

Add an extra property to the ExchangeSchedulerProvider call (I have called it "calendars")

private string[] calendars;
        public string[] Calendars
        {
            get { return calendars; }
            set { calendars = value; }
        }

Then I have changed "GetResourcesByType" to (off course you can set the name and key values to whatever you want)

public override IEnumerable<Resource> GetResourcesByType(RadScheduler owner, string resourceType)
        {
            string[] sharedCalendarNames = calendars;

            List<Resource> resources = new List<Resource>(sharedCalendarNames.Length);

            for (int ix = 0; ix < sharedCalendarNames.Length; ix++)
            {

                Resource sharedCalendar = new Resource();
                sharedCalendar.Type = "SharedCalendar";
                sharedCalendar.Key = sharedCalendarNames[ix];
                sharedCalendar.Text = sharedCalendarNames[ix];
                sharedCalendar.CssClass = "res" + sharedCalendarNames[ix];

                if (!owner.Resources.Contains(sharedCalendar))
                {
                    resources.Add(sharedCalendar);
                }
            }

            return resources.ToArray();
        }

Now, you can just add an array of strings to the provider

//rooms is of the type string[]
((ExchangeSchedulerProvider) owner.Provider).Calendars = rooms;

That's all I wanted to share with you.

[Peter]

Hi Hans,

Thanks for posting your findings in the forums.

All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Noureddine]

Hi,

I am looking for the same, do you have a sample project, where I can define my Exchange Rooms and group the scheduler by rooms?

[Boyan Dimitrov]

Hello Noureddine,

I would like to clarify that "rooms" variable is an string array containing some string values for sample purposes. Its purpose is to show you can make the provider more generic and show the grouping functionality.

Regards,
Boyan Dimitrov
Telerik