Scheduler logic outside of silverlight

[DJ]

Hello,

I have got the silverlight scheduleview working in a MVC application using a WCF service as the backend to store the data in a database. I also have a hidden silverlight application connected to a socket server I have created that I plan on using to push appointment data to the front end wrapped in a JS function to alert a user that an event is about to come up in the same fashion that Outlook does this. This socket server will be connected on every page in the MVC application (pages that do not have the scheduleview).

My question is: Is there an easy way to use Teleriks dlls to pull the data from my database table and parse the data? Most importantly the recurring events so that it could parse the recurrence pattern and give me something like a List<Appointment> or List<Occurence>.

I am mainly focused on the recurring events because I can easily pull non recurring events and read the information and push the data. The only thing that has got me in a bit of a bind is parsing the recurrence pattern string and exceptions to get a list of appointments. I could write my own helper class to do this but I don't want to reinvent the will since it is obviously working fine in the Scheduler/ScheduleView.

Thanks,
DJ

[Wayne]

I am also working on a problem where I need to know the matching appointment for a person at given time.  I need to accomplish this on the server as a background process by just querying the database.  What I was thinking is using a DB trigger when an appointment is saved in the Telerik recommended table schema (http://www.telerik.com/help/silverlight/radscheduleview-populating-with-data-binding-to-db-datatier.html) to also update a simple table of appointments that have the appointment start and end times (and in my case the person it is for).  That way, a simple query can be used to do the matching.

I have found the RecurrencePatternHelper (http://www.telerik.com/help/silverlight/radscheduleview-features-recurrences-recurrencepatternhelper.html) can be used to read the recurrence pattern and produce a list of appointments, but it does not take into account any exceptions. 

It seems all the logic is already built into the Telerik SchedulerView as it displays appointments, exceptions and all. Now if there was some way of getting that information into an easily queryable form in a database.

Thanks
Wayne I

[Yana]

Hello Wayne,

I am afraid that you can get all the occurrences and exceptions of the recurrent appointments only after they're loaded in the control. They appointments cannot be created with a query to the database. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,
Yana
the Telerik team

[hwsoderlund]

@Telerik: I would like to ask you to first of all extend RecurrencePatternHelper to make sure that the exception rules are taken into account when calculating the appointments, but also to consider providing a server-side version of that component. With LOB applications, the requirements never stop at just displaying things inside a scheduleview component in a Silverlight app. People want to have their appointments show up in Outlook, Google Calendar etc. Maybe somebody wants to expose appointments as an RSS feed. Then they decide they want e-mail reminders an hour before an appointment, or perhaps they want to be able to see todays appointments in a plain list on an asp.net-powered intranet dashboard. Without easy access to the logic behind RadScheduleView, it is not so easy to provide these things. And as other people have mentioned before me in this thread, the code is already there. We just cannot access it.

[Yana]

Hello Henrik,

Thank you for sending your feedback,  this feature request will be considered.
For now,  you can use the import/export functionality of the ScheduleView, please check this online example where the approach is demonstrated.

Kind regards,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Phil]

I've had the same problem. The way I've worked around it is to use the WPF versions of DLLs in the service side. 

Unfortunately it means that code to transform the database table row into ScheduleView Appoinment object can't be shared, but its a small price to pay for the very useful functionality you get. At least the interfaces are the same. 

I would second your suggestion, Henrik, to make the helper classes indenpendant of the UI layer.   There are a lot of useful classes here that are not UI focused, and so to bundle them in with UI controls is not the most useful design.
Phil