EMC Events Calendar
Help: Entering New Events

HELP!

Click here for general assistance with the events calendar Click here for help setting up repeating events and duty rotas Click here for the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list Please advise any errors, omissions, or questions arising from this "help" by email to EmcHelp@macfarlane.biz

1. General
2. Display formatting

• Start- and end- times for each event are optional.
• In general, most things are optional.
• Duty rota events, and "repeating" events, are automatically generated into the diary. Duty rota events cannot be directly edited or deleted, regardless of privilege. To change Duty Rota events, privileged users (administrators) must change the duty rota itself. All the recurring (or duty) events will then be re-generated from "today" onwards.
• Privileged users (administrators) can alter (or delete) "repeating" events that were automatically entered into the calendar, but if the definition of the repeating event itself is ever updated, then your changes may be overwritten (and deleted events may be reinstated) when the replacement events are entered back into the calendar.
• Each event can optionally be associated with a club section, and/or a location (venue), and/or an "event type" (e.g.: meeting, competition...). This allows the diary for to be searched for events of a specific type. For example, a schedule of club meetings, or "Club 500" races can easily be extracted from the diary, perhaps for circulation externally.

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• Various attributes can be specified for the display of events in the diary, such as text colour and style, background colour. These attributes can be defined for:
  1. events
  2. event types
  3. locations
  4. sections
• The order of precedence is events, event types, locations, sections (ie, the order shown above). So that, for example, if the foreground colour is specified for an event, that will over-ride any foreground colour specified for the section associated with the event.
• If any of {text colour, background colour, text style} are specified, all three attributes are taken from the same place. For example, if you define all air section events to be red and in italics, and all "chapel farm" events to be bold, air section events at chapel farm will be displayed in bold text, but not red or in italics.
• Similar "priority" logic applies for icons displayed alongside events, which can also be defined for events, event types, locations and sections (also rotas and recurring events).
• Rotas and repeating events are stored separately and used to generate actual events as necessary. Therefore, any formatting or icons defined for rotas and recurring events has the same precedence as for individual events (ie, highest precedence).
• This hierarchy for formats and icons is fairly powerful. Used with care, it is intended to standardise presentation for similar events. However, it is also far too clever for its own good and can give confusing results. Therefore, my advice is to use the formatting features sparingly!.

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