Hi Folks!
Would greatly appreciate best practice guidance for the date/time type in AppSheet…
Scenario: An announcement is scheduled for April 2021. Initially the dates are for April 1 - April 30th. As the announcement approaches, we will know the specific date/time.
I feel like this has to be done with 8 different fields but wanted folks feedback to see if there is a more simple way.
Kindly note we need the dates and times for the calendar and for a massive concatenation formula in the background building out a summary statement for an email workflow.
Proposed Fields:
The Calendar UX is based on the hidden fields.
Is this the best way? Is there an easier way?
I don’t completely understand Scenario, why Start and End Dates would have Times at all nor how Activity DateTime fits into the picture. Could you elaborate a bit more?
Also, what does it mean that “Calendar UX is based on the hidden fields”??
How about just 4 fields; start date, start time, end date, end time?
That could work. I still wonder about Activity Date.
If I understand correctly, the idea is to hide the Time component until there is a Time to enter. So how do you tell the app to finally show the Time? I suppose you could have Yes/No column shown only the form that allows the person editing to signal they are ready to enter the Times.
Personally, I don’t like to separate Dates and Times that are meant to be together. For this case I would use a DateTime and set the Time component to 00:00:00. Then simply update the time when ready.
I would then show the Start Date and End Date normally along with a message: “Event Times coming soon!”. I think it’s easier implementation and more valuable to the end user.
Have you consider simply having a Start DateTime field and an End DateTime field and then defining a “special time value” that means the time is not defined? You might pick a special time value like “00:00:00” or “23:59:59” assuming those are not legal times for an announcement. You could then custom format DataTime values and omit the time if the “special time value” is present.
Let’s take this a few steps back:
My teammate is managing an activity (Unicorn Launch 2021). Today, they know it will be in Q2, but not sure when. When they add this activity to the tracker we need to see it on the calendar for all of Q2 2021.
In February they will have the specific date and time for launch. They need to update their activity so we can see it on the calendar (and include which hour it will launch).
Few items of note:
All of the above is leading me to think I need at least three fields for time and four hidden fields for the calendar output and email workflow statement. Check out the diagram below. Can this be done better? Maybe…. Is there a way to hide the time part of a formula based on another field?
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