Table of Contents

Calendars

Ro Chittick Updated by Ro Chittick

What are Calendars?

A calendar view is used to display multiple records from your database in a Calendar viewable from your live app.

What do Calendars look like in the Live App?

Calendars display multiple records from one of the objects in your database in a graphical calendar interface.

Calendars can be displayed in multiple formats, such as a month, week, or day views:

Clicking on a calendar event can display more details in a popup. Each record’s details can be linked to a child page to edit or view more details about that record:

What do I need to use Calendars?

Calendar views are only available if a Date/Time field is used in your app. Further, only objects that have at least one Date/Time field will be available as an option to display records within a calendar view.

Manage Calendars

Where do I access Calendars?

Calendar views can be added and accessed in the Pages section of the Builder, in the same manner, other view types are accessed and added. 

Calendar views can be added using the “Add View” button. Existing calendar views can be found by navigating a specific page in your Builder that contains that view type. 

To learn more about how to add, edit, and delete calendar views from your app, see About Views. 

New calendars will default to use the first date/time field as its source to display records in the calendar, the first short text field as the label by default, and the first six fields for displaying popup details.

Adding All Day and Repeating Events

Adding all day and repeating events are only available if a Date/Time field is used in your app with calendar options enabled. When adding new events, all day events or repeating events can be defined when updating the date field.

Calendar Settings

To access the settings of a calendar view, hover your mouse over the view and click on the pencil icon that appears at the top left of the view.

This will open the view settings in the toolbox to the left of the view preview. For calendar views you will have the following options:

  • Source
  • Calendar Settings
  • Event Details
  • New Event Form

Source

The Source section is used to control the records the calendar will display. 

The calendar will display all the object's records by default, however in the Source section of the settings you can customize which records are shown by adding additional rules and limits.

  • Data: add additional rules to limit which records will be displayed. For example, you could add a rule to only show Events that have a status of “approved”
  • Limit: show all the available records or limit to a specific number.

Click here for more on working with the view source.

Calendar Settings

The Calendar Settings section is used to control how the calendar works with your object to display events:

  • Display: Calendar or List. The Calendar option is the default choice here when using a typical graphical interface. The list option lets you display as rows of text but still lets you navigate by the different ranges or days, weeks or months.
  • Starting Range: the calendar has options to display in multiple date ranges: by month, by week, and by day. The user will be able to change which range they display the calendar in. This selection sets the starting range.
  • Date Field: select a field that the calendar will use as the date to place each event on the calendar. This field must be Date/Time type.
  • Label Field: select a label field that the calendar will display along with the date on the calendar. Choose a title, name, or any other field that can easily identify the whole record.
  • Week Start: select if you want the week on your calendar to start on Sunday or Monday.
    • Exclude Weekends: check this option to remove weekends from the calendar.
  • Starting & Ending Time: limits the time range shown in week and day views.
  • Feeds: Feeds give the user options to download feeds that include all the events the calendar is displaying:
    • Show RSS Feed Link: an RSS feed can be subscribed to and will automatically update events in an RSS feed reader. 
    • Show iCal Download Link: a downloadable format that can be used to import the current events into another calendar service. Only the date/time and label field values will be included.

Notes on Feeds:

  • The iCal download/URL of your calendar events will include only the upcoming and previous six months of events, based on the date you download the events. The iCal format will also not update with new events automatically from your App to the secondary calendar.
  • The feed will not work if it's meant to show records connected to the logged-in user, or similar. Only the date/time and label field values will be included.
  • You can sync Knack calendar events to a Google calendar by right-clicking the iCal download link (on your Live App calendar view) and selecting the "Copy Link Address" option. You can then paste that URL into the “Add by URL” option in the Other Calendars section of your Google Calendar.
  • If you get an error, "We could not parse the calendar at the URL requested.", it likely is due to the file size of your iCal .ics file. Google recommends a file size of less than 1MB, so the number of records or other filters may need to be applied to keep the file size under that limit.

Event Options: these options enable additional user options when clicking on a date/time on the calendar:

  • Click on an event to show details: when activated, the user can click on each event to view more details about that event in a popup window. See the Event Details section below for formatting this popup.
  • Click on the calendar to add events: when activated, the user can click on a day in the calendar to add a new event. The date field will default to the day that was clicked. See the Add Event Form section below for formatting this form.
  • Drag events to different times: when activated, the user can drag an event and move it to change the date, time, and duration.
  • Label Format: define the style which field labels will be shown on event details. 
  • Event Colors: add rules to display events in different colors based on the criteria you add.

Filters Options: allow you to define who and how your records can be filtered on the view. 

  • Don’t allow records to be filtered: Disabling this will allow users to add any filters they'd like to the calendar. This will then display an "add filters" link above the calendar:
  • Allow users to add custom filters: filters give the user tools to further refine which records the calendar will show. You can add filters as options for the user to add, or as a menu.

Allowing users to add filters will display a filter button above the calendar view as seen below.

The calendar will update as soon as a filter is added. Multiple filters can be added as needed.

  • Which fields can be filters: You can determine which fields are available t o use as filters. This can be limited to the fields used in the calendar view or all the fields in the object.
  • Filter presets: You can add preset filters that will initially filter the records when the page loads.

Use a filter menu: Enabling a filter menu will present links above the calendar the user can click that will filter the records based on the rules you create.

Title & Description: here you can title your calendar view and add a description to give you users more context on what is included in this calendar. 

  • Title: the text here will display as the main title above the calendar view.
  • Description: here you can add additional description text that will display below the calendar title

Event Details

If your calendar is configured to show more details about a record when you click on it in the calendar, you can manage that details appear here. This follows the same model as the Details view.

Click here for more on managing Details views.

Add Event Form

If your calendar is configured to allow new records to be added when the calendar is clicked, you can manage the form inputs here. This follows the same model as the Form view.

Click here for more on managing form inputs.

Notes and Troubleshooting

  • When using a Date/Time field with calendar options turned enabled, if the end date is set before the start date's value, the calendar will utilize the end date as the start date, and vice versa.
  • If a calendar view is set to display in the month view, on the Add Event Form in the Live App, the "All Day" option will be checked by default. Week and day view displays of a calendar view do not have the "All Day" option default checked when adding a new event.

How did we do?

Source: Which Records Will the View Display

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