The latest in-app update to DayBack Calendar introduces “breakout” to Resource View. This lets you work at longer time scales (up to nine weeks at a time) while focussing on what’s scheduled for each resource.

Resources in DayBack can be your people, rooms, or pieces of equipment, and you balance your workload by dragging events from one resource to another.

Here’s a video of breakout in action:

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New – Breakout by Status & Collapse

The December 20 update to DayBack lets you breakout by Status as well. We hope to allow you to breakout the horizon view by all kinds of things (including by calendar and by project) so stay tuned!

And the January 10 update lets you collapse breakout rows (dimming the rows via CSS is a simple mod you can make following the instructions toward the end of the page here):

Breakout is a Free Update

If you’re already using DayBack, breakout comes as a free in-app update: just click “Admin Settings” on the settings tab then “check for updates”. New in-app updates are installed in one click: there is no need to re-integrate DayBack into your file. Though with this update you will add a couple of new lines to one of the calendar’s scripts so that you can control if breakout is on or off by default.

If you purchased DayBack more than a year ago as an outright purchase (not a subscription) your in-app updates may have expired (they’re included in your purchase for one year). Fortunately, you can extend your in-app updates if they’ve expired.

The latest in-app updates to DayBack adds the ability to duplicate events by dragging them, improved date fidelity outside the US, and a red line indicating the current time. None of these updates require any changes to your FileMaker file: just click “check for updates“.

Duplicating Events

Easily duplicate events by dragging them.

Just hold down the Option key (Mac) or Control key (Windows) before starting to drag the event. Look here for more details and a movie of this in action.

Improved Date Formatting

We’ve done a lot of work to help DayBack better reflect your date and time preferences when you’re getting started. When your date formatting is set to “auto”–as it is by default–DayBack now does a much better job displaying dates and times that match your machine’s language.

Notes on how this works, and how to tweak these formats are available in a revised article on date formats.

Show the Current Time

DayBack now shows you a live indicator of the current time so that you can see how much time you have left before your next appointment.

The current time is available on all “hourly” views except  for the pivoted schedule: it will be available there, and on mobile, next.

Check out the new version by downloading a 30-day, customizable trial and see your own schedule in DayBack.

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DayBack Calendar does a great job visualizing conflicts in your schedule. But sometimes you may want to alert users when they’re creating a conflict that they may not see.

We’ve created a simple script you can paste into your copy of DayBack Calendar to help notify users when they’re creating a conflict. Here’s the script in action:

Adding this to your file

Begin by downloading the script here. That’s an example file containing just the new “Detect Conflicts” script.

Next, import this new script into your calendar file: open DayBack–or the file you’ve pasted DayBack into–and from the Scripts menu in FileMaker, select “Import”. Once that script has been imported, edit the script named “Create Edit Delete Event ( SourceNo, Operation ) { Hide, DateStart , DateEnd , TimeStart … }”.

Scroll towards the bottom and create the lines shown in blue below. Here is the calculation to use for that first IF() line:

not IsEmpty ( GetField ( $$sc_SourceTableOccurrenceName[$sc_SourceNo] & "::" & $$sc_FieldForResource ) )

That’s it. With that new script, and those new lines added to the “Create Edit Delete Event…” script, users will be notified whenever an edit to an event–or a newly created event–overlaps with another event having the same resources.

Notes

• The script does not test for conflicts if the event being edited has no resource–though you can change that by altering that IF() statement above.
• The script currently only tests for overlaps within a single table: the same table as the event being edited.
• All-day events sharing the same resource are also considered to be conflicting.
• The script is completely abstracted as far as field and layout names go. Once you add this to your file, feel free use literal field and layouts names if you want to change the scripts behavior… provided you’re using a single source for your events. If you’re using multiple sources you may want to keep things abstracted so the script works with any source.
• The script contains some placeholder lines for records you may wish to omit from conflict consideration: in these placeholder lines we omit records where the status is “pending”, for example.
• You may want to add this test to the IF() statement shown above as well as including it in the “Detect Conflicts” script– the reason is that “Detect Conflicts” will return any conflicting events that overlap the event you’re editing: so you may be editing event “A” which, because of its status does not count towards conflicts, but in the same time frame events “B” and “C” conflict with each other. In this case, including your status test only in “Detect Conflicts” will return a conflict in this case, including it in the IF() statement above will prevent edits to “A” from showing the conflict.
• You can take this script further by implementing a “notified” flag so users aren’t warned about the conflict after they’ve accepted it one, even making that flag user-specific, if you wanted to. If you’d like our help extending this script, sign up for an implementation package, and we can make the changes for you, or coach you through making them yourself.
• For more on resource scheduling in DayBack, including more videos, check out resource scheduling in our docs.

We hope this helps make your resource scheduling a little easier and stops conflicts from sneaking up on you. =)