Application Setup - Planning

The Planning tab is grouped into four cards: a generic block, Time Windows, Visualization, and Calendars.

Generic

Field	Description
Enable appointment containers	Feature flag to toggle appointment containers.
Multi-day capacity distribution mode	Controls how the capacity is calculated for multi-day appointments. Options: None, Constant, Even. To learn what these do, continue here.
Do not count appointment resource	When enabled, the resource that owns an appointment is not counted toward the appointment's resource quantity. Useful when one resource always supervises rather than performs.
Disable recalculate planning quantity	When enabled, Dime.Scheduler stops recalculating planned and remaining quantities on the task whenever appointments change. Use this only when a back-office system owns those values.

Time Windows

Field	Description
Apply requested dates	When activated, appointments are created from the task's Requested start date and Requested end date fields. Read more about this here.
Apply requested times	When activated, appointments are created from the task's Requested start time and Requested end time fields. Read more about this here.
Respect allowed date constraints	When activated, extra data validation is executed on tasks. Read more about this here.

Visualization

Field	Description
Enable planning board tooltip	When activated, hovering over an appointment on the planning board shows a tooltip. The tooltip's content is configured in Field Templates.
Render category in background	When enabled, all grid-based components displaying appointment or task data render the category color in the row background.
Alternate rows	When enabled, all grid-based components in the planning view show alternating row colors.

Calendar settings

Field	Description
Enable resource calendar visualisation	When enabled, resource availability is visualised in the planning board. Read more about it here.
Resource zone color	Color picker for the background color of non-working times in the planning board. Read more about it here.
Resource calendar recalculation mode	Controls how appointments react when they overlap with a resource's non-working time. Options: None (no automatic recalculation), Extend duration (extend the appointment to compensate for non-working time), Update planning quantity (keep the duration but adjust the planned quantity).

Applying requested dates

When you drag and drop a task from the open task list onto the planning board, this setting forces an appointment to be created using the Requested start date and Requested end date parameters of the task:

• When only the Requested start date is populated, the appointment is created on the Requested start date with the duration as specified on the task's Duration value.
• If both Requested start date and Requested end date are filled out, an appointment is created with start and end dates equal to the requested start and end dates.

Applying requested times

The scope of this setting is nearly identical to the requested dates feature but with one different detail: instead of applying dates, this feature applies only hours and minutes; thus it does not affect the date.

Respect allowed date constraints

When you drag and drop an appointment, this setting disallows the user to place an appointment outside the Earliest allowed date or Latest allowed date, which is data that can be found on the task.

Appointments that are created manually or backed by tasks that have no requirements set on these fields are not impacted by this restricted planning mode.

Calendars

Calendars are used to define common work patterns. They are used in the Gantt chart and the planning board.

Calendars fulfill two functions in the planning board:

• Showing unavailable working times for each resource
• Recalculating the duration of an appointment to take non-working time into account

These are reflected in the following three configuration items:

• Enable resource calendar visualisation
• Resource zone color
• Resource calendar recalculation mode

The first two are particularly useful for the planner because the user actually sees when resources are available. The recalculation mode is part of the optimization suite and is quite powerful: when an appointment is created or updated, the application can automatically extend the duration to make sure the resource can finish the task according to their calendar. For example, if a resource has a normal nine-to-five job and is scheduled to perform a two-hour task at four o'clock, then the application is smart enough to set the end date to the following day at ten o'clock. The planner can always override this behavior in the planning board or the appointment, which is a good example of the multi-layered configuration mechanism Dime.Scheduler applies: