248630 - Multiple recurrence rules, exception rules [extension fodder]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Victor Engmark]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8

One of the most annoying things with Outlook is its poor ability for defining
advanced events. A good example is a school course:
- it is a recurring event (so far Outlook handles it)
- it occurs at different times of the day (oops, Outlook obliges you to specify
one event for Mondays 12-14, and one for Thursdays and Fridays 10-12)
- it occurs at different places (oops again, the Thursday and Friday events will
have to be split)

The result is three calendar events for something which really won't be counted
as different events by the user, and which will be hard to maintain on a larger
scale.

The event format is IMO _the_ most important part of the calendar, and should be
very generic.

I propose to either enable multiple "recurrence" tabs for each event, or modify
the recurrence tab to show a list with recurrence summaries like "every sunday
10-12 except the last Sunday before December 13" which can be clicked and
changed in a separate window.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[gekacheka]

This looks like two different requests:
  Mondays 12-14, Thursdays and Fridays 10-12
    This requires two separate recurrence rules for the same event.  
    Workaround: Use two events.
    Not clear how a simple user interface can show multiple rules on 1 event
    (simple from the user's point of view).

  Sundays 10-12 except the Sunday before December 13
    The current interface does not permit exception rules.
    Workaround: use specific exception dates.

Note: Sundays 10-12 except Sunday 11 Dec 2005.
    This is currently possible.

Maybe it would help to have concrete examples of difficulty caused by splitting a two-rule event into multiple events.  Currently it seems like this is rare, and the workaround (use two events) is easy, so it's better to leave this to an extension than complicate the default interface.

Renaming summary from "Separate occurences and events" to "Multiple recurrence rules, exception rules" to avoid confusion with bug 194556.

Comment 2

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

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

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove

Comment 3

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

While this may be a good idea from a functionality perspective, it is a nightmare from a UI perspective. I honestly don't know how to design a usable user interface, which would enable such a complex functionality.

In my opinion even users are not seeing events like the Monday engineering course and the engineering course on Thursday as one recurring event. They are seeing this as two different events with different contents like essay topics are always given out Thursday and need to be completed until next Monday and the like.

Therefore I think our current user interface (and Outlook's) are quite adequate for normal purposes. In the end, stuff like this is decent extension fodder, but nothing that the main app is going to incorporate right now.

Comment 4

[Daniel Boelzle [:dbo]]

RFC2445bis now clearly states that RRULE SHOULD NOT be specified more than once per component; allowing multiple RRULEs is no option.