794006 - Scheduling a recurring event

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Mozilla Reps Graveyard :: reps.mozilla.org, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Jeremie Patonnier :Jeremie]

I organize a recurring weekly event in Paris, is there a way to setup such an event once and for all in the reps calendar?

Comment 1

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Here are a few ways to create a recurring event system:

1) Create a batch of events based on the recurrence rule. So if an event is supposed to recur every Tuesday at 8am, when someone creates the rule, automatically create an event on each Tuesday for the next 10 or 20 or 30 Tuesdays. The number of future events is kind of arbitrary; but note, it is not "forever". Because you can't create an infinite number of events in the system. This can be refined by requiring a number of recurrences between 1 and 99, for example. After 99 recurrences, the event has to be recreated. If someone tries to find an event 101 weeks out, they won't find it.

2) Create a rule instead of an event when recurrence is selected, and create a job that regularly builds the next events based on the rules. So if an event happens every Tuesday at 8am, create a rule for that, and then every night, check to see if there is another one of those in the future. If not, create one. These can be built a few months out to help people find them in the future, but even so someone may search out beyond the edge of the set of created events.

3) Create a rule instead of an event when recurrence is selected, and then autovivify events and event stubs whenever events are required. So if an event happens every Tuesday at 8am, and if someone is looking at an events list for events in December 2019, pretend that an event already exists on every Tuesday of December 2019. If someone RSVPs for one of those Tuesdays, create and save the event. This approach risks creating and letting people RSVP for events in 2019, which is unreasonably distant.

The point is that this is a nontrivial technical challenge. Suggestions or feedback for implementing it (in one of the above ways or some other way) are welcome!

Comment 2

[Ioana Chiorean]

HI William , 
two reps asked me about this feature - any idea about its priority?

Thanks!

Comment 3

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

I totally see how some Reps organize recurring events and this feature would be useful for them. I give it a low priority though, since this feature is pretty complex to develop and we do have an easy alternative. Justin provides great analysis in comment 1 about why recurring events are non-trivial.

For Reps who do have recurring events, we have a great Clone button on each event page that can be used to quickly create more events. That button was created with recurring events in mind and it only takes 1 minute to clone an event.

Comment 6

[Ranjith Raj]

Yeah! 2-3 reps in the Southern part of India are planning few recurring events as part of 2018 goals. This feature at the earliest would be of great help.

Comment 7

[Ranjith Raj]

Any update on this?

Comment 8

[Daniele "Mte90" Scasciafratte]

Probably for this feature we need:

* event placeholder with field to fill to generate the url and title
* settings to set the event as recurrent to repeat every day/week/month
* hide the event placeholder on the home but show somewhere else maybe in the dashboard

Comment 9

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Moving this to P4 as we won't do any complicated new features and fixes for not completely broken features for events for now.

Comment 10

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

As we've moved from reps.mozilla.org to the Community Portal, I'm closing this bug. Filter out these emails by searching for "REPS_PORTAL_BUG_CLOSURE"