Submitted by Darwin on 2010/04/01 10:12
Title says it all, if not that clearly! I keep track of my work schedule in IQ and have recurring meetings, for which I invoiice and am paid, each week. However, often single meetings are cancelled and I delete the single occurrence accordingly, maintaining an accurate overview of my worked and billable hours. Where I run into trouble is when the meeting times/days change and I try to edit the end time of the recurrence.
 
eg I have a weekly meeting on Tuesdays from 5 to 6:30 PM. I set it up as a recurring event stariing October 6 2009 and running through June 22, 2010. Every so often, I delete single occurrences due to cancellations and all is well - I have an accurate record of my hours. Then, in February, peoples' schedules change effective March 1 and it is necessary to switch my Tuesday meeting to Wednesday. So, I go into IQ, select my recurring event and edit the recurrence, changing the end date of the recurrence from June 22, 2010 to February 23, 2010. Now I'm in trouble, because I get a warning that my earlier exceptions (ie deleted single occurrences) will be lost. Clicking OK confirms this - the earlier individual events are "replaced" and my accurate record of hours worked is shot.
 
Am I approaching this wrong, or can this behaviour be modified?

Comments

Hi Darwin,
 
Yes... And I think Outlook 2003 deals with recurrences and exceptions in the same way IIRC. It's a drag.
 
At some point I tried an add-on called WS:Repeat Appointment II which did exactly what I wanted : create independent items for recurrence, and not the same item appearing in different places in the calendar (change the schedule, and all customization is gone for others...).
 
I think there should be something like that for IQ too (choice to have as many individual items as there are repetitions).
Pierre : wasn't it part of your plans ?

Darwin

2010/04/01 18:40

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Yes! This is exactly what I was trying to do - what happens is that doing this REPLACES all deleted exceptions in the range Oct.5 to Feb. 29 (ie if I had earlier deleted a meeting in, say, January, editing the recurrence end date results in that meeting re-appearing in my calendar).

Darwin

2010/04/03 12:39

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Just to clarify, the new end DOES delete everything after it. My problem (and Outlook's problem, too, apparently) is that editing the end date restores previously deleted events that occur(red) prior to the end date, even if the end user (me!) has deleted a single occurrence of the event.

This is the way Outlook works, and the default behaviour of the control used for the Calendar does the same thing.
 
In 0.9.27, a new UI will be proposed which will deal with these and other "frustrating" issues. I'm a big fan of Google Calendar and it will be used as a model for IQ's
 
 

Darwin

2010/04/02 13:25

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Good to know! Thanks for the reply, Pierre - keep up the good work