Plan a recurring appointment
Repeating jobs - weekly maintenance, monthly inspections - without copy-pasting the appointment every time. You can still skip individual occurrences when reality gets in the way.
Before you start
Recurring appointments follow the same logic as Outlook, so the mental model transfers. Two Dime.Scheduler specifics are worth knowing before you build one:
- Every series must end. There is no infinite recurrence. A never-ending series would flood the back office, so you cap it either by a number of occurrences or by an end date.
- The pattern is only editable from the appointment editor. Any other gesture that changes an occurrence, including a simple drag on the board, converts that occurrence into an exception rather than editing the series.
Dime.Scheduler is compliant with the iCalendar (RFC 5545) specification, so a rule like FREQ=DAILY;COUNT=10;INTERVAL=2 means what you would expect if you are pushing rules in over the API.
1. Create the appointment
Start from a normal appointment, planned the usual way. Recurrence is off by default: the repeat field sits at None and an appointment that does not need a pattern is already finished.
2. Build the recurrence rule
Pick an interval and a button appears next to the field. That button states the rule as a sentence rather than a pattern, which is the fastest way to catch a mistake: "every second weekend day, every two months" is far easier to check than the controls that produced it.
Click it to open the builder, which takes three things:
- Frequency: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.
- Interval: options vary by frequency. Weekly requires at least one day. Monthly offers either a day picker or presets, so both "the 1st, 15th and 30th" and "every second weekend day" are expressible. Yearly mirrors monthly but works on months.
- End: on a date, or after a number of occurrences.
The distinction between the two end types is not cosmetic. For a weekly on Monday series starting Tuesday 1 January 2019, "5 occurrences" and "until 1 February" produce different series: the count runs to 4 February, the date stops at 28 January.
3. Expect the start date to move
If the appointment does not comply with its own rule, Dime.Scheduler moves it. Set a weekly on Wednesday rule on an appointment that starts on a Monday and the original shifts to the first date that satisfies the series.
This surprises planners who expect the appointment to stay where they put it. It applies to weekly, monthly, and yearly patterns alike.
4. Handle the exceptions
All occurrences are created and published immediately, and each carries a repeat icon on the board.
They are created independently but stay linked, so they can move freely without breaking the series. An occurrence that has been changed outside the editor becomes an exception occurrence, marked with an exclamation mark in front of the repeat icon. Dragging one to a different duration is enough to create one.
When you edit an appointment that belongs to a series, Dime.Scheduler asks whether you mean the whole series or this occurrence. The rule for what happens next is worth internalizing:
- Change the pattern, dates, or duration and the whole series is recalculated. Exceptions are reset back onto the pattern.
- Change only subject, resources, or indicators and exceptions keep their status, dates, and resources. Only the master data updates.
So editing a subject across a series is safe. Editing its duration is not, if planners have been moving individual occurrences around.
5. Watch the series start date
Choosing "the entire series" adds one more prompt: which start date the series should use. By default it keeps the first occurrence's date.
Two overrides exist, and one of them shifts everything. Ticking use the appointment's start date while editing, say, the second occurrence moves the whole series one occurrence to the right. Leave it unchecked to keep the original start.
Verify
Check the far end of the series, not the first few. Confirm the last occurrence falls where you expect, since that is where the count-versus-date difference shows up.
If planners have already adjusted individual occurrences, confirm those survived your edit, or were intentionally reset.
Related
- Ad-hoc service planning for one-off work.
- The appointment editor reference.