Product Documentation

Calendar reports are named as their output is presented in a traditional calendar format. All calendar reports rely on choosing a date on which an event happens. The date may be, for example, the due date of an activity or task, or may be a date such as the date a group of issues were created.

When there is an activity or event displayed on a calendar report, you will see metadata associated with the event on the report, and additional information when you hold your mouse over the event. Double-clicking on the event will pop up an Edit window for the event. Double-clicking on an empty spot on the calendar will allow you to create a new event (or issue). Assuming you have permission to alter the date that is being displayed on a report, then you can drag the event to a new place on the calendar. Doing so automatically updates the underlying issue. You may take an existing event and create recurrences of the event. For example, you might have an inspection that is due each Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. You create the first inspection event, then use the recurrence to create additional events at the same time on each successive week. Any one issue or event may be set up to recur a maximum of 366 times.

Once displayed, the calendar report contains many views - daily, weekly, the work week, monthly and an agenda view. Of special interest is that you may overlay many calendar reports on top of each other. This allows you to create many filtered views of events using different dates within your system, or events with different filters. These can then all be displayed on the one calendar report screen, using color to differentiate between the different sets of results. It is simple to navigate to different dates and date ranges.

A key point is to recognize how dates with a field display type of date and day are treated. Date type fields are placed on the calendar output at the precise time during the day that they occur. Day type fields have no time component and they are always placed at the top of the calendar report, at midnight of the day on which the event occurs.

Creating a Calendar Report

From the Query screen, choose the Create new calendar report option. You will see this screen:

Calendar Editor

• The Report title and the Description are required before you can save the report you create.
• Calendar reports may only be output to the browser. They cannot be output to other destinations such as Microsoft Office documents or to Adobe Acrobat PDF formats
• Items displayed on Calendar reports are based on either a single date field or on two fields. If you select the option Use a date field at a single point in time then the calendar will display items at the date and time of the value of the field you select. If you select to Use a time span between two date fields then there will be two date fields used where you enter the starting date and time of the event in the first field and the ending date and time of the event in the second date field. Only date fields will appear in the lists offered. If the field you select has a display type of day then it does not have a time component, and the event will be displayed at midnight of the value of the event. If the field you select has a display type of date then the event is displayed at the time during the day of the event. Note that items created at a single point in time are actually displayed as one hour-long events. This is simply for display purposes. This has one effect that is worth noting. If an item at a point in time is created closer than one hour to midnight, then the event will only appear in the same day. It will not appear into the next day.

  Choosing dates for calendar reports

• The View option allows you to initialize the calendar report in either a daily, weekly, work week, monthly or agenda view
• If you check the box to Collapse Toolbar then the toolbar on the output is not displayed when the report is first created
• The Title Fields are going to be displayed on the calendar, at the top of the event. It is recommended that you select the ID and Title of the item to be displayed
• The Description Fields are those that will appear in a window that pops up on the report output when you hover your mouse over an item. You may place any fields here, but it is recommended not to choose more than a handful of fields
• There is a button to the right of the Report Title that appears when you are editing an existing report. When you place your mouse over this button, you will see who created the report, who last updated the report and the dates when these actions occured. This is most useful for managing shared reports.

Viewing the Output

Click on the Day button to see the daily view.

Calendar Daily View

Click on the Week button to see the weekly view. Note there is also a Work Week view which will only display Monday through Friday.

Calendar Weekly View

Click on the Month button to see the monthly view.

Calendar Monthly View

Click on the Agenda button to see the agenda view. This displays all the results in time-sequence.

Calendar Agenda View

If you place your mouse over an event on the calendar, a popup appears displaying the fields selected in both the title and description field lists in the report editor.

Calendar Popup

Manipulating Issues on the Calendar Output

You can both update events directly on the calendar report as well as add new events. In addition you can alter the time or duration of the event by dragging it to a new location on the calendar.

• Adding an event: Double-click on the background of the calendar and an add screen will open, allowing you to add a new issue (event) to the database. The add screen that appears will be that of your current Business Area and Project. Note that no verification screen appears after adding a new issue via the Calendar report
• Updating an event: Double-click on an event on the calendar, and you will open up the event (issue) in an edit window. Make any changes to the underlying issue and then update the issue in the normal way
• Moving an event: Click on an event and drag it with your mouse to a new location on the calendar. The date field upon which the event is based is updated when you drop the event at its new date and time. Note that if the field is read-only, or is one of ExtraView's built in fields (such as the Date Created or the Date Last Updated then you will not have permission to drag-and-drop the event to a new date and time
• Extending the duration of an event: This is only applicable to events that cover a time span, i.e. they have a beginning start date and time and an ending date and time. You may move the event, in the same fashion as the previous bullet, or you can extend or reduce the duration of the event by using the anchor point at the bottom of the event. You can click on this and drag the end point of the event to the new date and time.

Adding Additional Calendar Reports to the Current Report

A useful attribute of the calendar is the ability to many calendar reports onto the same report output. The results of each additional query after is selected via the Add/Remove Calendar Reports button after displaying the first calendar. When you press the button, you will see a screen similar to:

Adding Additional Calendars to the Report

Simply check the reports you want to add into the existing report output. Up to 24 calendars can be added into the one report. This image shows two calendar reports displayed together:

Multiple Calendars on a Single Report

If any of the calendar reports that have been added to the output have runtime filters, then an icon appears beside the report title at the left-hand side of the screen. Clicking this icon allows the runtime filters for the report to be altered.

Recurring Events

Recurring events may be created from any calendar event where there is write permission to the date field(s) upon which the report is based. For example, you cannot create a recurrence on a report based on the date created field as this is system maintained, but you may create a recurrence from a calendar report that is based on a user defined field to which the user has write permission. The ability to create a recurrence is indicated by a small arrow at the top left-hand corner of the calendar event as shown here:

Click here to enter the recurrence for an issue

When you click on the arrow, a window dialog box pops up, allowing you to create various types of recurrence:

Creating a recurrence for an issue

Issues can be made to recur on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. For any choice of the period, the popup dialog box alters to allow you to set up the recurrence. For each recurrence, a new issue is cloned from the original at the appropriate day and time. You can set up any issue to recur a maximum of 366 times. Once the issues have been created, they work independently when a user updates each issue, although you can alter the recurrence, or sever an issue from the recurrence.

Hierarchical Calendar Reports

If your administrator has defined hierarchies on which you can report, you will see an additional prompt on the report editor screen:

Reporting on hierarchies within calendar reports is similar to the way they are defined for column reports (See the section on Column reports for a full explanation). The key difference is that you are only required to select the filters for each level in the hierarchy. These filters will be applied to each level of the hierarchy for the preparation of the data to be placed on the report. The report output will look very similar to a standard summary report, except that the additional filters are applied.