Recurring event calendar?

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a basic event management script for a society that runs a
lot of projects. At the moment they use a Google Calendar to manage
event listings, which is all very well but doesn't integrate into the
site too well. There are limited choices/control over integrating the
Google tool into the site, and I also want members of the website to
be able to 'attend' an event by clicking a button that will then store
their user_id in association with that specific event.

This leads me to my code: I've written a simple date-picker script
that lets admins create events ranging over a period of time. I just
added a boolean 'isWeekly' to the table, and I was thinking of testing
for this when displaying the calendar, and simply duplicating the
event every 7 days on the calendar.

This presents problems if the event is cancelled, or just isn't taking
place one week, for example. The alternative would be to create
distinct rows in the table for each recurring event (let's say, if
it's a weekly event, it'll create 52 entries to cover the next year).
I'm still not sold on this idea either though - if someone messes up,
that's a lot of records to edit and fix.

Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? Maybe some way I could
interface with Google Calendar in order to log who's attending what?

- Matt

On May 22, 11:17 am, Matt <guitarroman...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm writing a basic event management script for a society that runs a
> lot of projects. At the moment they use a Google Calendar to manage
> event listings, which is all very well but doesn't integrate into the
> site too well. There are limited choices/control over integrating the
> Google tool into the site, and I also want members of the website to
> be able to 'attend' an event by clicking a button that will then store
> their user_id in association with that specific event.
>
> This leads me to my code: I've written a simple date-picker script
> that lets admins create events ranging over a period of time. I just
> added a boolean 'isWeekly' to the table, and I was thinking of testing
> for this when displaying the calendar, and simply duplicating the
> event every 7 days on the calendar.
>
> This presents problems if the event is cancelled, or just isn't taking
> place one week, for example. The alternative would be to create
> distinct rows in the table for each recurring event (let's say, if
> it's a weekly event, it'll create 52 entries to cover the next year).
> I'm still not sold on this idea either though - if someone messes up,
> that's a lot of records to edit and fix.
>
> Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? Maybe some way I could
> interface with Google Calendar in order to log who's attending what?
>
> - Matt

Hi Matt,

The Gdata API is quite robust and you can access what you are looking
for through it. Google worked along side the Zend Framework
development team to come up with a simple API within Zend Framework
1.5+. Check out the component information at:
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/....calendar.html

Regards,

Steve

Matt wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm writing a basic event management script for a society that runs a
> lot of projects. At the moment they use a Google Calendar to manage
> event listings, which is all very well but doesn't integrate into the
> site too well. There are limited choices/control over integrating the
> Google tool into the site, and I also want members of the website to
> be able to 'attend' an event by clicking a button that will then store
> their user_id in association with that specific event.
>
> This leads me to my code: I've written a simple date-picker script
> that lets admins create events ranging over a period of time. I just
> added a boolean 'isWeekly' to the table, and I was thinking of testing
> for this when displaying the calendar, and simply duplicating the
> event every 7 days on the calendar.
>
> This presents problems if the event is cancelled, or just isn't taking
> place one week, for example. The alternative would be to create
> distinct rows in the table for each recurring event (let's say, if
> it's a weekly event, it'll create 52 entries to cover the next year).
> I'm still not sold on this idea either though - if someone messes up,
> that's a lot of records to edit and fix.
>
> Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? Maybe some way I could
> interface with Google Calendar in order to log who's attending what?
>
> - Matt

Matt,

I'd go ahead and create a separate entry for each event. If it's always
the same event, you don't need everything - i.e. you could have an
events table, and an event_date table.

But you really should be following this up in a database newsgroup such
as comp.databases.mysql. This isn't a php question.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================