Indicators
A planner stares at a dense planning board for hours. Anything that helps them spot a pattern without reading a single word of text saves real time. IndicatorsIndicatorCollective term for the visual signals - categories, time markers, pins, and tags - that identify and label appointments. are how Dime.Scheduler makes that possible: small visual signals attached to the planning data, each answering a different question about the work.
This page is where you define them. The back-office application is usually the master for the indicators themselves - it sends them across along with the planning data. What it typically does not send is what each one should look like, because that is a visualisation choice rather than a master-data choice. So in practice you create indicators here only when the back office isn't doing it, and you spend most of your time deciding what things look like.
The four kinds of indicator
Each kind has its own tab at the top of the page, and each answers a different question.
Categories
A categoryCategoryA visual indicator (a color) applied to appointments to classify or label them. answers what kind of work is this. It is the primary classification of an appointmentAppointmentA task scheduled to a resource for a specific period - the scheduled instance you see on the planning board.: order type, work type, status, truck load - whatever the single most useful split is for your planners. An appointment has exactly one category.
Categories are the only kind with an extra column, Outlook Preset, which maps the category onto one of the fixed Outlook category colors. That mapping only matters when appointments are synchronised to Exchange, so the color a planner sees in Outlook lines up with the one on the board. Categories are also the unit used for user assignments, which lets you steer who is allowed to plan which type of work.
Time markers
A time markerTime markerA visual indicator on an appointment, separate from its category, used to flag a status or condition at a point in time. answers what is happening during this appointment. It is a second, independent signal on the same appointment: a lunch break, standby, travel, a customer meeting inside a longer job. Like the category, an appointment has exactly one.
The distinction between a category and a time marker is worth getting right up front, because both are single-valued and both are colors. Use the category for the classification you sort and report on, and the time marker for the state that changes during the day.
Pins
A pin answers what kind of thing is this on the map. Pins color the markers in the map component, typically by skill, vehicle type, or region, so a planner scanning a geography sees the right technician without opening anything.
Pins live on tasksTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource. rather than on appointments, and they are the only kind that has no equivalent on the planning board.
Tags
Tags are currently in preview. Functionality and behavior may change between releases. Not recommended for production-critical workflows yet.
A tag answers what else do I need to know. It is the one kind that is not single-valued: a task or an appointment can carry any number of tags at once. That makes tags the place for everything that does not fit in the single category slot - urgent, night shift, call the customer first, waiting on parts - without inventing combined category values like "Urgent - installation".
Tags also differ in that they are referenced by a stable code rather than copied onto the record, and they render as icons rather than as a color fill. See Tags for what planners do with them.
How each one is rendered
Defining an indicator is half the job. The other half is knowing where it will actually show up, because that is what decides whether a given color choice reads well or gets lost.
| Indicator | Where it appears |
|---|---|
| Category | The fill color of the appointment bar on the planning board. It is the largest area of color on the board, so it dominates the visual read. |
| Time marker | A colored horizontal bar drawn on the appointment. A thin accent rather than a fill. |
| Pin | The color of the resource marker in the map. |
| Tag | A row of small icons at the top of the appointment bar, each in the tag's own color, plus colored chips in the Tags column of the task and route grids. |
There are more visual signals on an appointment than the four you manage here - importance and notifications are driven by the back office rather than by a catalog. For the whole picture, and for advice on choosing a palette that survives a dense board, see Appointment visualization.
Managing the catalog
Every tab works the same way. Click Add for a new row, or the pencil icon on an existing row to edit it. The count next to each tab name tells you how large the catalog already is, and the search box filters the list, which starts to matter once a catalog grows past a screenful. Each tab can also export its contents to CSV.
To remove indicators, use the trash icon on a single row, or tick the checkboxes and delete several at once. There is one safety rail on categories, time markers and pins: indicators that are still in use by jobsJobA high-level container, comparable to a project, that bundles related tasks together with common information such as customer, billing, and address., tasks, or appointments cannot be removed. Clear the references first (or wait for the back office to clear them), then come back and delete.
Tags are the exception. Deleting a tag does not touch the records that reference its code. Those references stay in the data and simply stop rendering, so recreating the tag under the same code brings them back.
Setting the color
Put a row in edit mode, then click the color cell to open the picker.
Pick visually with the color area and sliders, or paste a hex or RGBA value directly when the design team has handed you a palette. New rows start out on a default blue, so a catalog that was imported from the back office and never styled will look uniformly blue until someone goes through it.
Which colors to actually pick is a design decision rather than a mechanical one, and it is worth a few minutes before you start clicking: see choosing colors that survive a real board.
The extra fields on tags
Tags carry three fields the other tabs do not, all of which follow from being referenced by code:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Code | The stable identifier that tasks and appointments store. Required, and locked once the tag is created - a rename must not orphan the records that reference it. Rename the name instead. |
| Icon | The icon rendered on the appointment bar. Pick one from the icon browser, which offers a curated set of suggestions as well as the full catalog. |
| Hidden | Hides the tag from the planner's pickers and from the indicators panel. The tag keeps rendering on records that already carry it; it just cannot be applied by hand any more. Use it to retire a tag, or for tags only the back office is allowed to set. |
Codes travel over the API, so choose them the way you would choose an ERP code: short, uppercase, and stable. NIGHTSHIFT ages better than Night shift (new).
Reference
Shortcut keys
| Shortcut key | Action | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| DELETE | Deletes the selected records. Is the equivalent of the delete button. | Only when a delete button is present |
| CTRL + click on group | Collapses the other groups in the grid | Only possible when grouping is set |