The NAS2004 Volume 3 release of WinSchedule™ includes support for Appointment Grouping. The WinSchedule controls that display activities (i.e., Appointments and Notes) have been modified to support the separation of activities that belong to different owners. This means that with a few simple property settings, the WinDayView™, WinMonthViewSingle™, and WinWeekView™ controls can display calendars for different owners, side by side, within the same instance of the element.
To support the Appointment Grouping feature, a new object was added to the WinSchedule assembly - the Owner . The Owner object was designed to represent a person, or department, to which groups of Appointments and Notes belong. The Owner exposes properties such as Name and Key to provide a means by which different owners can be distinguished from one another. The existing Appointment and Note objects now expose new properties, Owner and OwnerKey , through which an Owner can be associated with the Appointment/Note. An Owner object is created by adding a member to the associated UltraCalendarInfo element’s Owners collection; at the time an Owner is created, it must be assigned a key that uniquely identifies that Owner.
The Owners collection always contains at least one member - the "unassigned owner" - which is present even if the collection is cleared. Any Appointment or Note that is not explicitly assigned to an owner behaves as if it were assigned to this special unassigned owner. A reference to this unassigned owner can be obtained via the UnassignedOwner property of the Owners collection.
Once an Owner object is created, it can be made to take ownership of any Appointment or Note by assigning that instance to the Owner property of the Appointment/Note, or by assigning its key to the OwnerKey property of the Appointment/Note. Once the Appointment/Note is assigned to a specific owner, the UltraWinSchedule elements that are configured to display different owner calendars separately will display that Appointment/Note only in that Owner’s calendar. In the case where the Owners collection contains a relatively large number of Owners, but not all of them are to be accessible through the user interface, the Owner’s Visible property can be used to show or hide that Owner (and its associated activity). Owners whose Visible property is set to true appear in the associated UltraCalendarInfo element’s VisibleOwners collection, providing an easy way to iterate through the owners that are currently accessible through the user interface. Similarly, the Owner object exposes a Locked property to support the concept of a "read-only" Owner - one that is displayed in the user interface, but whose Appointments and Notes cannot be modified.
In addition to the behavior-related properties of the Owner object, several Appearance properties are exposed as well, providing the ability to achieve unique looks for each owner. The following table lists these Appearances, as well as the element(s) to which they apply, and a short description of what aspect of the display they control:
The UltraDayView control exposes properties that dictate how the different owners will be displayed within the control. The GroupingStyle property defaults to "NoGrouping" (to preserve backward compatibility), but can be set to "OwnerWithinDate" to display all visible owners within a given date, or 'DateWithinOwner' to display the contents of the associated UltraCalendarInfo element’s SelectedDateRanges collection within each owner.
The ColumnScrolling property determines whether and how the end user can navigate through the columns. The following table lists the different settings for the ColumnScrolling property, along with a brief description of how each setting affects the user interface:
Additional properties are exposed that allow the end developer to further customize the user interface. For example, the AllowColumnResizing property can be set to False to prevent the end user from changing column widths, and the MinimumColumnWidth property can be set to make the columns a specific width. Owner headers can be shown or hidden by setting the ShowOwnerHeader property; the PreferredInViewColumnCount and PreferredInViewGroupCount properties can be used to set an initial width for columns (or number of columns displayed) while still allowing the end user to change them during the application session.
The UltraMonthViewSingleBase-derived elements (UltraMonthViewSingle and UltraWeekView) expose an OwnerDisplayStyle property, which determines whether Appointments/Notes are grouped by owner, or whether they are intermingled. The property defaults to "Merged" (to preserve backward compatibility), but can be set to "Separate" to have the controls display different calendars for each visible Owner in the associated UltraCalendarInfo component’s Owners collection.
The OwnerNavigationStyle property determines whether and how the end user can navigate through the different owners. The following table lists the different settings for the property, along with a brief description of how each setting affects the user interface:
The MaximumOwnersInView property is used to specify the number of owners that will be displayed by the control. As with the UltraDayView control, the ShowOwnerHeader property provides a way to show/hide the owner headers.