165298 - [RFE] support variable interpolation in event name, desc, etc.

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Susana L. Gallardo]

If you add an "original date" field to the recurring calendar event, it can
automatically calculate that year's event as 3rd, 35th....  i.e. enter a
birthdate  6/25/65, and have the auto-calc'ed "37" appear appended to event
title "Ana's birthday, 37"....

Comment 1

[ajbu]

Calendar might define some variables for use in the title/description, but I'm 
not sure this will be used enough to be worth the trouble.
Maybe birthday can be an option for addressbook.

Comment 2

[Mike Potter]

The original date should be the start date of the event.
The bug here is to display the number of times an event has occurred (perhaps
based on categories, perhaps for all events that repeat yearly).

Comment 3

[Mike Potter]

*** Bug 167462 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Drew Devereux]

> not sure this will be used enough to be worth the trouble

I would use it plenty.  My paper calendar keeps count of home loan repayments,
for example.  When I started using this calendar, I wanted this feature enough
to individually enter events called "Repayment 47", "Repayment 48", "Repayment
49" etc, instead of entering a single recurrent event that can't keep count.

Comment 5

[Mike Potter]

New contact from [e-mail] to [e-mail]
Filter on string OttawaMBA to get rid of these messages. 
Sorry for the spam.

Comment 6

[Rutger van der Valk]

I would ask you to seriously consider this option. It is an extra feature, but 
a very nice one if I may say so.
I use it in my mobile phone (Nokia 6100) and it just works perfectly.

Also Lotus Organiser has this option and my father in law uses it to keep track 
of the years an employe is working for his company and to keep track of 
birthdays of his employees.

Comment 7

[Joey Minta]

*** Bug 281440 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[gekacheka]

*** Bug 315475 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

*** Bug 315475 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Andrew N Dowden]

This should be linked to Bug 151994 (birthday field, from Address Book)

Comment 11

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Reassigning all automatically assigned bugs from Mostafa to nobody@m.o

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove

Comment 13

[Pete Riley]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The original date should be the start date of the event.

I agree.

> The bug here is to display the number of times an event has occurred (perhaps
> based on categories, perhaps for all events that repeat yearly).

I don't think that it should be for all yearly events because there are some (e.g. holidays) where it wouldn't make sense.  However I like the idea of basing it on categories.

It seems that the main challenge is how the user can specify which categories will use the behavior.  Perhaps there could be a checkbox in "Tools > Options > Lightning > Categories".  When I edit a category, there is already a checkbox for 'use color', so maybe a second checkbox would work well.

Also, because the width of event titles is very limited (e.g. in month view and in the today pane), I suggest that the addition to the title is short.  For example:

   Event Title 10
or Event Title, 10
or Event Title (10)
or Event Title - 10

The first form is the shortest and IMO looks as nice as the others.

Comment 14

[Pete Riley]

Also, it would be nice if the tooltip for these events would show the start year (e.g. when born or when married).

Comment 15

[Benjamin Danowski]

I don't know if it is the right place to suggest this but a GUI for creation of birthdays and other reoccurring events with a "counter" would be a nice thing to have. Or at least the possibility to use a counter should be implemendted. Personally I use Lightning to remind me of birthdays and it would be nice if Lightning could show me the calculated age of the person. At the moment I use ThunderBirthDay which retrieves the birthday date from the hidden entries of the addressbook. But for some people I don't want to create an entry because I don't have their email-address but only their phone numbers.

Comment 18

[Florian Haag]

I strongly support this request and consider it an essential feature for the calendar.

Note that birthdays are just one very special case. Generally, all recurring events with a start date should be countable. The number should be inserted replacing some substring (e.g. %index% or something like that) in the title. If that is not possible, the occurrence index should at least be displayed somewhere in the event settings dialog box.
Using a placeholder rather than appending the number automatically to all events of a certain category or something like that has the following advantages:
- The occurrence index can be placed at an arbitrary place within the title text etc., thus at the correct position according to the user's language.
- The occurrence index will not be displayed for repeated events that are not supposed to be counted.

Some examples of applications would be:
- birthdays, based on the birth date
- release numbers of software that is released regularly (I do this with an icon collection, for example)
- lesson numbers, e.g. "the nth lesson of a 20-lesson language course"

Further considerations:
- Where does the counting start? Ideally, this can be set as an attribute of the event (as e.g. birthdays start at 0 (if you enter the date of birth as the first occurrence, otherwise, arbitrary numbers are possible); lesson and release numbers start at 1.)
- While we're at it: I imagine that if the number of occurrences since the start date can be computed, also computing the number of occurrences left before the end date (and providing another placeholder for that) might not be too much of an effort. (Just to come back to one of the previous examples: How many lessons are over is not always the interesting part; sometimes it's more interesting how many more there will be ...)