Editing Summary Field

Mods, Tips, Tricks, and Support for Zulu
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 6:26 pm
PostPosted: Mon May 21, 2012 9:17 am
I'm about to set up a new zulu installation, which will allow some editing from iCal. As I understand zulu so far, the Summary field is the one that is displayed in the calendar, and is not supposed to be a calculation (which makes perfect sense, if someone needs to edit it). So I expect the summary field for this project to use an auto-enter concatenation of other data from multiple fields.

Question: Is there a "best practice" for managing how iCal edits to such a field are re-interpreted/updated by their source fields?

TIA,
debi
Debi Rubel
FullCity Consulting
SeedCode Staff
SeedCode Staff
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Nov 20, 2003 11:01 am
PostPosted: Mon May 21, 2012 1:49 pm
Hi Debi!

Not sure if there is a "best practice" here, but we do find ourselves using something like this a lot...

Checkout the demo of this here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBx9O9hE-wU

...and you'll see we use an auto enter calc to push lots of related information into the event's description field, while leaving a section of the field (above "---add notes above this line---") so users can still use it as a notes field. In this example we use Zulu's post-edit script to add the contact ID to the event, and then let the auto-enter calc format the description field.

Here is what that auto-enter calc looks like:

If ( IsEmpty ( Events::_id_Contact ) ; Events::Description ;

//------------------------

Let ( [
sep = "---add notes above this line---" ;
c = Contacts::NameFull_LastFirst ;
co = Contacts::CompanyName ;
a = Contacts::AddressStreet1 & ", " & Contacts::AddressCity & ", " & Contacts::AddressPostCode ;
e = Contacts::Email ;
u = Contacts::URL ;
p = Contacts::Phone ;
n = Substitute ( Left ( Events::Description ; Position ( Events::Description ; sep ; 1 ; 1 ) -1 ) ; "¶¶" ; "" )
] ;


If ( PatternCount ( Events::Description ; sep ) = 0 ; Events::Description ; n )


& ¶ & ¶ & sep & ¶ & ¶ &

List ( c ; co ; a ; e ; u ; p )

& ¶ & ¶ & "Status: " & Contacts::Status

& ¶ & ¶ & "LastContact: " & GetAsText ( ContactLastEvents::DateStart ) & " " & ContactLastEvents::Summary

& ¶ & ¶ & "Notes: " & Contacts::Notes


)

// --------------------

)


Hope that helps,

John
John Sindelar
SeedCode
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2010 6:26 pm
PostPosted: Mon May 21, 2012 2:33 pm
Thanks, John - that's a big help. I still have to hammer out some details, but this really clarifies some options for controlling different components of a record, and points me to the critical script if we end up needing to do heavy post-edit verifications, etc.

debi
Debi Rubel
FullCity Consulting

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