Is this your DayBack story? You have users who are primarily using one calendar view for a long time, and another user updates an event. In a busy scheduling environment–like a call center–how does everyone know that something has changed? Normally other users won’t see these changes until they change a filter, change their view, or click the calendar’s refresh button. This can slow folks down or poorly schedule a particular resource or timeslot thanks to out of date information.
Listening for Other Users’ Changes in DayBack for FileMaker
We recently had an opportunity to modify a customer’s DayBack for FileMaker 19 to automatically refresh any modified or deleted events for other users viewing the same data. Imagine – the front desk receives a call from a customer who needs to change an appointment to later in the day. For staff in the back office, this is reflected in DayBack just seconds later with no user interaction required. This is a game-changer for our customer, and perhaps it will be for you as well!
We’ve uploaded a simplified version of what we created that you can paste into your own deployment of DayBack (example file and instructions follow below). Here’s a short video of this customization in action:
How It Works: Execute FileMaker Data API
When a user makes a change to an event, a field on that record captures the host’s current timestamp of when the modification was made. By using the host timestamp, we can ensure that the modification timestamps are consistent, regardless of the time zone any individual user may be in. An on timer script will run for each user, and if it finds that there are events that have been modified, it will update the display of these events.
4 Comments
Hi,
This is an old post, but I just updated to FM19, but I’m keeping for now the Dayback classic, did too many custom changes to redo it all again, at least for now ! I’m very satisfy with that version, it does what I need.
So on FM19 with Classic DayBack, all I have to do is to set a script timer for the fresh ? Or I can refresh only the event that was changed in real time ? Not sure I get this part.
I haven’t found a specific post for that on Classic running FM19.
Thanks,
I apologize for the late reply, Jean-Francois. Unfortunately, this refresh behavior isn’t available in DayBack Classic.
This looks fantastic. Can it be integrated to work in the ‘Classic’ versions easily?
Sorry for the late reply, Terri! You could customize this to work in DayBack Classic using a slightly different approach. If you’re not yet in FileMaker 19, there is no Data API script step for you, so you’d use Execute SQL instead (another way to retrieve data without needing to open a new window). And the method to refresh the calendar when you’re done is different in Classic.
The big difference is that in Classic you’d likely want to see if any events are changed and, if so, trigger a complete refresh, rather than what Ann is doing in DayBack for FM19. In the new DayBack, Ann is quietly injecting the changed events into the current display. Ann’s method is *very* fast whereas doing this in Classic would be asking for more data from your FileMaker Server every time there is a change.