Hello -
I have a need to add 1-3 custom fields to each appointment. I've seen folks reference two possible options. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with these options and can give any insight/advice. Specifically I'm wondering about the UI side of things (this post explains the data side pretty well http://news.infragistics.com/forums/t/7683.aspx)
1) Custom Appointment Form: It sounds possible to write my own appointment form, and cancel the Infragistics dialog and open my own. My question is, how much work is it to plug into the infragistics recurrence workflow (recurrence form, Occurrence/Series dialog etc.)? Can the infragistics Recurrence form and Occurrence/Series dialog be reused with my custom Appt form? Are there any other complications to get the proper events to fire (AddActivity, AddRecurrence, AddVariance, UpdateActivity, etc.)? Is it worth going to this trouble for 1-3 custom fields?
2) Change the Infragistics Form: I've seen a few posts that recommend sending data from the DB to hidden fields or javascript objects on the page. When the dialog opens, send the custom info to the existing Infragistics page using the FieldValues javascript object. Then customize the existing page/control with custom fields and consume the dialog's save event to send the custom info as hidden input. Finally consume the ActivityAdded and ActivityUpdated events to send the custom info to the DB. This seems like a lot of work too, but I don't know if it's appropriate for minor customizations. It would be nice if this solution was cleaner too.
Any Thoughts/Advice? Are there other options that I haven't listed?
I have a little more insight on my situation. Another brain-dump is in this post (http://forums.infragistics.com/forums/t/12904.aspx).
For the most part the details are the same as option 2. The big difference is that I decided to add a WARP control to the appointment form. This WARP control gets the custom data for the selected appointment. This removes the need to send all custom data for every appointment on the MonthView/WeekView etc. to the calendar page, and then send that data to the Appointment page when an appointment is clicked. Still not the best solution, but I think it's cleaner...
-Brian