How to trigger reports on calendar

[Tom_Cat]

Hi,
So I have a calendar with child events for some ordering system I’m trying to come up with. When you add a new event, through the behavior actions I create an additional 2 events:

• Reminder date
• Due Date
  These 3 events (placed, reminder, due) all show appropriately in my Calendar and it’s all nice and dandy.
  However I want the app to send emails or reports on the dates that are in the calendar:
  For example:
  -I Input event order No. 1234, automatically It’s set to remind me in 3 days to prepare the order and after 10 days it will be past due. All 3 events are now in the app calendar.
• After 3 days I want to receive an email that says “hey, order No. 1234 needs to be prepared! it hasnt been updated in 3 days”
• After 10 days i want to receive an email that says “hey, order No. 1234 is past due, make it a top priority!” or something.

Can this be done? or am I asking for too much ?

[WillowMobileSys]

Yes you can! You’ll want to look at the Reports tab. Reports are basically like Workflows, except they are generated by a schedule (note: reports cannot make data changes). Reports can send emails, text messages and Push Notifications.

The finest granularity available is Daily but then you can schedule the report to run at any time throughout the day. So you have a couple of options as far as when to schedule the reports.

1. You could have a single report run, e.g. at the start of the day and identify all calendar items needing a message for the day and send them all out at once.

2. You create reports to run each hour. This would mean a separate report job for each hour you want the report to run. An example might be you only want a report to run at the top of the hour from 7am to 6pm. So you would create 12 separate reports, one runs at 7am, 2nd at 8am, etc. Each report identifies the items due for a message within the next hour and generates the desired message for only those items.

I hope this makes sense!

[TyAlevizos]

John is spot on and beat me to it. I’ve been meaning to build this example as it has been on my to-do list of mini-apps. Here’s a working prototype:

https://www.appsheet.com/samples/Calendar-With-Reminders?appGuidString=438533ab-e66b-45ab-b890-7f8c2...

you already had the first part (create three events in total for each event created), for which I built the bare minimum … and second, the reporting that John mentions. Hope this helps!

[Tom_Cat]

Hi thank you! that seems to work!
Quick follow up, can you use & conditions on the workflow condition? like for example I am trying for the condition to be this:
Today() = [Date_Event] & [Event] = Reminder
But if I test that all rows show as true

[WillowMobileSys]

Yes. There is a logical and operator…well more of a function. You would implement AND like this:

AND(Today() = [Date_Event], [Event] = "Reminder")

I am not sure what “Reminder” is. If it is straight text, then be sure to include the quotes.

[Tom_Cat]

Thank you, yes the reminder was a text. it works now! Perfect!
The only issue is that the email is empty. How do I populate it with the results? I dont get any tables or anything like I want to get the email saying “[Serial No.] Reminder date is [Date of Event]. and it is past due”
Where [Serial No.] come from the “Results” that yielded true.

[WillowMobileSys]

Can you provide some images of what you have created so far for generating the email?

[TyAlevizos]

BTW, I have made changes to the app I posted above. Rationale:

there is a concept of the “event date” and then there is a secondary concept of dates that should refer to the event date. So there are now four columns in the data source.

When the workflow runs it creates calendar entries for three different days, but when the report runs, it will now send out a ICS template referring to the “main event”.

There’s still an issue with timezones which I have not had time to tackle. E.g. an event for 2 PM pacific will generate an ICS for GMT time (midnight).

All just FYI