Tool Tips on Special Slots

[Michael Lilly]

I'm trying to implement Tool Tips on Special Slot styles and can't get anything to work properly.  Either the tooltip shows over the style of the slot (even when the mouse isn't over it), or doesn't show at all.

Is this possible?  I'm using the same code as your demo site uses for the special slots demo.

Thanks!

[Valeri Hristov]

Hi Michael,

The HighlightItem objects that represent the UI of the special slots are rendered in a panel that is IsHitTestVisible=false, e.g. they do not receive mouse events and you cannot display a tooltip on them. This is because the slots' panel has to be on top of the appointments' panel and they should not interfere with each other.

Instead of using special slots you could use "special" appointments and handle them differently in the drag-drop behavior - for example, you could disable the drag and resize of the special appointments (this is easy) and when a "regular" appointment is dropped onto a "special" appointment, you could replace the "special", or do nothing, depending on your business logic. Or instead of replacement, you could hide the corresponding "special" appointment using the AppointmentsFilter functionality (let me know if you need an example about this feature, as the online demo example did not made it for the release).

Greetings,
Valeri Hristov
the Telerik team

[Michael Lilly]

Unfortunately, your suggestion will not work for us.  We need the Special Slot to stay even after an appointment is placed over it.  So in order to do what you suggested, I would need to change it to a special slot when a user drags an appointment or something.  That just isn't something I would want to do since every time the ScheduleView draws, I would need to determine how to drawn these Special Slots.

Is there another way to do the Special Slot functionality other than HighlightItem?  I need the ability to use mouse events for tool tips and context menus.  I have a feeling I could duplicate what I did on the original Scheduler, but that was very clunky so I would rather not.

If not, I would like to request this for the future extending of the special slots functionality for ScheduleView.

The use case is, a special slot can have extra information that we want to display to the user.  In our application, these special slots are used for a work hours type of situation and a time slot reservation system.  Certain reservations can only be scheduled over with an appointment that has certain properties.  We used the tool tip to inform the user what type of appointment can be scheduled over the reservation, for now I can just put the necessary text in the special slot itself, but that will get messy quickly.  The context menu allows the user to edit the reservation or directly schedule an appointment over it.

Thanks!

[Valeri Hristov]

Hi Michael,

Do you expect several appointments to be present in one reservation? For example, if the reservation (e.g. the special slot) is for 3 hours, would you want to put three 1 hour appointments inside?

Greetings,
Valeri Hristov
the Telerik team

[Michael Lilly]

Yes, a customer could have a whole day reserved for only their appointments if they wanted to.  And only they could schedule any appointments on that time.  Other customers would see that reservation as ReadOnly, though, and can't see the tool tip or anything, just completely locked out...at least, that's our implementation, and I can handle most of it (already have).  This is the same scenario I used in the "How drag and drop works" thread, in that thread, though, I can't restrict appointments from being dropped or created on a Reservation due to custom drag drop behavior doesn't know about the special slots.  So this is just an extension of that request.

I had implemented all of this in Scheduler, but we are moving to ScheduleView so I'm trying to do it the "proper" way with it rather than duplicating the rig job I did on Scheduler to get it all to work.

[Valeri Hristov]

I will have to discuss how to proceed with your requirements with the dev team, as we need to check the possible implications that could occur if we make the HighlightItem controls for the special slots IsHitTestVisible=true (I was wrong when I said that their container panel is IsHitTestVisible=false, the items have this property set, not the panel, which makes the things a little bit easier).

I really don't want to push you to use hacks to get what you need from RadScheduleView and we will try to help you as much as we can, even if this requires us to add new APIs to the control.

Best wishes,
Valeri Hristov
the Telerik team

[Michael Lilly]

Great, thanks!

I look forward to seeing what can be done with Special Slots in the future.

[Thomas]

Hi, 

I also need to add tooltip to Special Slots, do you have some news about this point ?

Thanks

Thomas

[Yana]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for sending your feedback.

This feature is planned but at the moment we cannot specify a certain timeframe for implementing it.

We're sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Regards,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Martha]

I also need this feature.
Which release is this planned for?

[Yana]

Hi Michael,

I am afraid that "Special Slots Tooltips" feature is still not scheduled,  Q1 will be released next week and the tasks for Q2 are not planned yet.

Thank you for the understanding.

All the best,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Sally]

Any news on this feature? We need this feature (to show Tooltips and context menu on SpecialSlot) as well. Anyone has a work-around solution before we get this feature in the future release?

[Yana]

Hello Sally,

We've logged this feature in our public issue tracking system, you can track its progress here.
In the meantime, you can use the workaround demonstrated in the attached project, note that in order to show the tooltips, you should disable MouseOverHighlightStyle,

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Yana]

Hello,

Here is the attachment.

Regards,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Sally]

Thanks! That really helps to solve my problem.

[Sally]

Yana,

I found a very strange problem with SpecialSlot. I have implemented my custom SpecialSlot. If I put a break point at Copy or CopyFrom function of the Slot, I can see it get hit all the time, even after the screen is fully drawn and no movement on the screen.

I've also noticed the scroll becomes really sluggish when I have many special slots on the screen. Not sure the two things (endless call for the Copy function) are related.  

You can download the sample project (based on your original project) to see this problem:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=ba61313dacad20a5#!/?cid=BA61313DACAD20A5!cid=BA61313DACAD20A5&id=BA61313DACAD20A5!133

[Yana]

Hello Sally,

Firing the Copy/CopyFrom methods is expected  - this is part of the internal logic of RadScheduleView control. You are right that creating so many special slots is the reason for the performance issue in your project. We are aware of the problem, but at the moment we cannot provide any workaround except to reduce the amount of the special slots.

Greetings,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Sally]

Thanks Yana for your quick response. The performance is really crucial to our application. What would be the alternative if we do not use Special slots?  We need the visual effect to show time binds that can stay behind Appointments. Using special slots looks like a perfect way to achieve that if the performance is acceptable. 

[Yana]

Hello Sally,

I am afraid that at the moment we cannot provide an alternative to special slots.  You could try to reduce their amount.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

All the best,
Yana
the Telerik team

[Tim]

FYI: An improvement request has been opened:

http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/143/Feedback/Details/88674-optimization-of-specialslots-rendering

[Yana]

Hello Stefan,

Thank you for sending your feedback on the matter.

Regards,
Yana
Telerik