256588 - banner events boxes spanning multiple day boxes in month and multiweek view

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Calendar Frontend, enhancement)

Description

[Scott Slaugh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

It would be nice if when using Mozilla Calendar, you could create a banner event
when you have an event that is repeated over several days, like you can in
Calendar Creator.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Create an event
2.  Have it span several days
3.  It shows on every day, rather than having an option to create a banner.

Actual Results:  
You can't create a banner.

Expected Results:  
Given a check box with an option to create a banner.

Comment 1

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

This is a feature of other calendaring software as well -- MeetingMaker and
Oracle Calendar/Corporate Time come to mind.

Sane RFE. Confirming. HW/OS -> All, Component -> FE

Comment 2

[gekacheka]

Screenshots might help explain the idea.
Is this for all-day events that last multiple days?
Which view(s)?  (day view, week view, month view?)
(If not all day, there is a conflict in week view if there are other events at
the same time.)

Comment 3

[Scott Slaugh]

I've attached a screenshot that shows banner events in CAlendar Creator.  When
you create an event that spans multiple days, you can make it into a banner
instead of having the text display on each day.

Comment 4

[Scott Slaugh]

Attachment: Banner event in Calendar Creator

Comment 5

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

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

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove

Comment 6

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

*** Bug 357504 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[David Tenser [:djst]]

"Banner event"? Sorry for the dupe, but this bug needs a better description badly. My dupe was "Repeated title for events spanning over multiple days". 

Comment 8

[gekacheka]

Retitled.

One limitation is the question of how to handle overflow.

Currently, when a day box does not have enough space to show all the events, it becomes a scrollbox with a vertical scrollbar, so it is obvious there are more events on that day.  This approach would not work well with banner events that crossed multiple days.  If the whole week overflowed as one, its scrollbar would be at the end of the week, and without a per day scrollbar it would not be as clear when any one day overflowed.

How do other calendar views handle a day with too many events to fit in a day box?

Comment 9

[Berend Cornelius]

berend: Accepting issue

Comment 10

[Berend Cornelius]

Setting issue back to 'nobody'

Comment 11

[Karen Pomerantz]

Outlook handles an 'overflow' of events in one day by showing a small arrow icon in the corner of the box for that day (when in the month view).
Clicking the icon switches the screen over to the single day view, allowing you to see all the day's events. I don't believe they allow any way of viewing all of the day's events when still in the month view.

I've attached a screenshot showing how outlook also handles multi-day events. Any event that is less than 24 hours in duration, when split over 2 days is shown as 2 separate events, one in each day (this annoys the hell out of me if i plan a late night out with friends, because an event from 8pm till 2am the next day, will be shown as 00:00-02:00 in the second day, by which time I've been to sleep, woken up, and I don't want to see that event in there when I consider that to be yesterday! but that's a whole other story that I shall deal with next!)
A multiple day event that is timed, and has a duration OVER 24 hours, is displayed as a 'banner' event with the clocks showing start and end times, white clock for am times, black for pm.
A multiple day event that is NOT timed, and is listed as an 'all day event' spanning multiple days, is shown as a banner without clocks.
I think outlook also always keeps multiple day events at the top of the lists, allowing it to display as a banner.

Hope this helps you find a way to incorporate 'banner' events for multiple days, because it definately does make you calendar a lot easier to interpret with a glance.

Comment 12

[Karen Pomerantz]

Attachment: Shows an overflow of events in month view, as well as timed and untimed multiple day events

Comment 13

[Karen Pomerantz]

Apple's iCal works in a similar way in the month view, it displays 3 dots in the day's box, literally just to inform you that there are more events than you can see there, but you need to swap over to another view to see them.

Comment 14

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

We could "solve" this by sorting allday events in the month view by their duration. Events with the longest duration would show up at the top. That should be a simple workaround and if it works as expected we could even consider removing the padding to the border of the day box for allday events.

Comment 15

[Pete Riley]

(In reply to comment #14)
> We could "solve" this by sorting allday events in the month view by their
> duration.
Seems like a good idea but please consider a multi-level sort, first by duration (if duration > 24 hours regardless if allday) and second by the order of calendars in the calendar list (if allday) and third by time of event (if duration < 24 hours and not an allday).

And it seems you'll need a way to have "empty spaces", for example:

Monday       Tuesday       Wednesday       Thursday
[empty]      Long Event    Long Event      Long Event
Short Event  Short Event

Comment 16

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Just wanted to point out that Google has a nice view of multiple days event, has shown on this GSFN thread: https://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/lightning_multi_day_events_look_not_as_nice_as_in_google_calendar#reply_10653070

Comment 17

[co2crash]

Is this dropped, or is a resolution possible?

Comment 18

[Ryan Rubley]

Is this bug still moving forward? Having multi-day all-day events display as separate events for each day in the month/multiweek view makes things very cluttered and hard to read.

I think this can be solved in a few phases:

1) Only show the description for the first day of the event in the week (preventing needless repetition of the label)

2) Expand the box edge graphics right to the edge of the day box and remove the border, except for the first and last day of the event, and first and last day of the week (those can optionally get triangles or something like Google Calendar if it helps)

3) The hard part - multi-day events need to "reserve" a row-slot in the day box display for the entire week. The first day of the week an event is drawn, it needs to pick the first open row, and reserve that row for the rest of the week, so no other events take it. This prevents the 'stair-step' effect.

Visually, this would make the multi-day events appear as one big long box for each week, even if it is actually drawn as 7 separate boxes.

Comment 19

[Decathlon]

@Ryan Rubley
Are you a coder? If you are interested in fixing this bug, I have an old patch that does about 50% of what you said (apart from details). The missing 50% is the part you named the "hard part" ;)

Comment 20

[Maiskolben]

Hey guys, is there something new to this bug? There are several questions still from 2003 on. Is there a patch existing or something? I think it could be the "last reason" for someone to change from other calender software like outlook to moz/tb...

Comment 22

[Maiskolben]

Hey Decathlon, yes my reported bug is a dublication of this one here, thanks for pointing that out.

Here's again my question: "Hey guys, is there something new to this bug? There are several questions still from 2003 on. Is there a patch existing or something? I think it could be the "last reason" for someone to change from other calender software like outlook to moz/tb..."

Comment 23

[Maiskolben]

and btw. if I would take a look at the part of the code, where can I get a copy?

Comment 26

[turtle]

Wow... this is 5+ yrs old. Any progress on this fundamental capability? I'm actually trying to migrate over from Google Calendar and Outlook but there's still a few things to sort out that calendar programs had in DOS. Not an insult... just telling the truth from a normal business user.

Comment 27

[mwoco]

Here some pseudo-code that could be used to solve the slot reservation problem mentioned above (see Ryan Rubley's post). @Decathlon: Would that work as a basis to extent your existing code?

// helper function (find free slot number in list of events)
function returnFreeSlot(listOfEvents)	
	numberToBeChecked = -1;
	
	do {
		numberToBeChecked++;
		numberFound = true;
		for each event in listOfEvents
			if (event.rowSlot = numberToBeChecked) then
				numberFound = false;
				exit for;
			end if
		next event		
	} while (numberFound == false);
	
	return numberToBeChecked;
end function

// initialization (set row slot of each event to "unknown")
listOfAllEvents = getEvents(firstDayInView, lastDayInView)
for each event in listOfAllEvents
	event.rowSlot = -1;
next event

// main loop
for day = firstDayInView to lastDayInView
	listOfEvents = getEvents(day) -> sortBy(eventDuration, DESC);
	
	for each event in listOfEvents
		if (event.rowSlot < 0) then event.rowSlot = returnFreeSlot(listOfEvents);		
	next event
next day

drawEvents(listOfAllEvents);