Unscheduled Items

Overview

Unscheduled items can now appear in a column to the right of the main calendar. Drag them from there into the calendar to schedule them. The unscheduled list is filterable, so you can see the unscheduled items for a particular customer or unscheduled items of a particular status.

And "unscheduled" can mean something different to every DayBack customer: under the hood, an item appears in the right-hand column if a field mapped to "unscheduled" is marked true. So these could be items that don't yet have a date or items with a requested date but no specific time. Or they could be contracted items that need fulfillment--often, these are created by a Salesforce flow and then arrive in DayBack to be scheduled.

You can also use unscheduled as a scratch pad: unscheduling items you need to move around while you navigate to different days and weeks looking for a place to put them.

Introduction to Unscheduled

What Are Unscheduled Items?

These are items that you know need to go on the schedule, but you're not yet sure where to place them. They'll show up in the right-hand sidebar until you drag them into a spot on your schedule. Here's what this looks like:

Example Usage

Here are a few of the things people are doing with unscheduled items:

• When a project is approved, you create several service appointments from within a flow. Those appointments are unscheduled until you drag them into the calendar. The unscheduled list reminds you which events remain to be scheduled and lets you filter the list by customer if you have too many. 
• You can create items directly in the unscheduled list by dragging the plus button up into the sidebar; this lets you capture details of an appointment before you've found the perfect slot for it.
• When you need to make room on your schedule, you'll move an already scheduled event to "unscheduled" until you can find a new place for it. In this way, the right-hand sidebar becomes a scratch pad for your calendar. 
• "Unscheduled" can be your to-do list. You drag items into the calendar when you want to schedule a time to work on them. Using drag-to-duplicate, you can pull an item into your schedule more than once.

Turning On the Unscheduled Sidebar

To enable unscheduled items in your DayBack, you'll do three things.

1. Visit admin settings and scroll down to the bottom of the Views items. Set "Enable Unscheduled" to Yes.

2. Turn on "unscheduled" for specific calendars. The "Calendar Info" tab for each calendar has a switch that will let you turn unscheduled "on" for that calendar.

3. Map a field to "unscheduled" in at least one of your calendars. You don't need to do this in MS365 or Google Calendar since we take care of this for you under the hood. In Salesforce and FileMaker sources, you'll see a field for "Unscheduled" on the field-mapping tab for each calendar. In Salesforce, you'll make a checkbox field, and in FileMaker you'll create a number field.
4. In FileMaker, you'll need to make a small edit to one of DayBack's FileMaker scripts. You only need to do this once per file, not once per calendar. Instructions are here: Turning on the Unscheduled List in DayBack for FileMaker.

Turn on Unscheduled for Only Some Users

In addition to turning on "unscheduled" for only some calendars, you can make the unscheduled list available to only a subset of users. Here's an app action that will do this for you: Disable the Unscheduled List for Specific Users.

What Makes an Item Unscheduled? Field Mapping

The unscheduled list is very flexible: an item appears in the list if the field mapped to "Unscheduled" is set to "true." 

In Salesforce and FileMaker sources, you'll see a field for "unscheduled" on the field-mapping tab for each calendar. In Salesforce you'll want to create a new custom field of the type "checkbox" to use for unscheduled. In FileMaker, we recommend using a new number field. You can also map "unscheduled" to a formulate field for even more control. 

There is no field to map in MS365 or Google Calendar since we take care of this for you under the hood.

Because this is just a "flag" indicating if an item is to be considered unscheduled, your unscheduled items may have dates, times, and resources already associated with them. And these attributes are preserved when you drag an unscheduled item into the calendar--unless your placement of the event overrides that. 

Here are some examples:

• You have two weight-loss check-ins that need to be scheduled for a client: each has a 20-minute duration. When you drag the appointment into the calendar to schedule it, you'll see it keeps that 20-minute duration.
• Your contract with a customer includes a two-day, on-site training that has yet to be scheduled. You've already assigned one of your trainers, Marty, to the event. When you drag it to a date in month view, it lands there as a two-day event for Marty. If you dragged it to another trainer's row on the DayBack's Schedule tab, it would retain the two-day duration but become assigned to the new trainer instead of Marty. 

Renaming "Unscheduled"

Because this list is so flexible, you may use it for things that aren't strictly "unscheduled." You could use it to list all the HOT items in your schedule, where "HOT" may be a status, or a combination of status and opportunity value. For this reason, you may want to rename "Unscheduled" to something else. 

Visit admin settings and you'll see three entries that contain the word "unscheduled" towards the bottom of the list. Replace the word "unscheduled" in there with anything you'd like. 

What About Dates?

The unscheduled list does not take dates into account--this is a feature! So if you're using unscheduled for "hot deals" you'll see all your hot deals regardless of what date in the calendar you're looking at. So, remember to include some temporal status element of the item if you map your unscheduled field to a formula field: in the case of "hot deals," the formula field might be "opportunities greater than $500k where the status is not closed." 

Your unscheduled events may have dates associated with them--the native Events in Salesforce, for example, can not have blank dates--but DayBack ignores them. 

Unscheduled vs. Unassigned

These are two different concepts in DayBack.

As described above in "What Makes an Item Unscheduled," an unscheduled item is simply flagged as unscheduled. It may already have a date and time, and it may already have a resource. It can be of any status.

An "unassigned" item is different. This item is not unscheduled--it appears in the calendar on a specific date and maybe at a specific time. But it does not yet have a "resource," so it shows up in DayBack's "none" column until it is dragged to a specific resource.

Using a Formula Field or a Status for Unscheduled

You may want to map the "unscheduled" field in DayBack to a formula field in Salesforce or a calculation field in FileMaker. This would let something like an event's status determine its unscheduled state. 

Once you select the formula field in field mapping, be sure to click "More" beneath the field and mark the unscheduled field as "Read Only." This will prevent DayBack from trying to write to your formula field or calculation. Failing to mark the field "Read Only" will cause Salesforce or FileMaker to throw an error when you try to change the status or duplicate the item in DayBack.

In Salesforce, you'll want your formula field to return the type "checkbox". You might use something like this to say an item is unscheduled when its status is "ToDo":

my_status__c == "ToDo"

When set up like this, changing an item's status in DayBack will move items into and out of the unscheduled list. So will changing the item's status in Salesforce.

When you drag an item from the unscheduled list to the calendar, you'll need a custom action to change the item's status as part of that drag. Here's an example action you can use as a starting point: it sets the status of events dragged from the unscheduled list to "pending."

Here is what that looks like in action:

Filtering And Sorting the Unscheduled List

Your unscheduled list may get quite long, so you can filter it using the search box at the top of the list. This filter supports the same grammar as the calendar filter in the left-hand sidebar, including comparison operators and the ability to filter on specific fields. You'll find notes on this grammar and examples here: Text Filter Options.

The unscheduled list does not respect the calendar filters in the left-hand sidebar, in the same way it doesn't respect the calendar's date ranges. The list will show you all unscheduled events unless you specifically filter it.

When you turn "unscheduled" on for your DayBack, you'll see options to sort items by creation date or by start date. We plan to add more filtering and sorting options to the unscheduled list, so please get in touch if your use case requires this.

The list does respect your calendar source's permissions, of course, so if users aren't permitted to see a specific Salesforce record, they won't see it in "unscheduled" either.

Move an Item into Unscheduled

Drag Items from the Calendar to Unscheduled

Buttons

You can add buttons to your event to send the event to the unscheduled list. If you haven't made buttons in DayBack before, it's very simple, and you'll find instructions here: Custom Button Actions. The code for your button named "Make Unscheduled" would look like this:

You can also use this code in any of the Event Action triggers, like On Event Click or On Field Change.

Checkboxes

(This only works on Salesforce or FileMaker calendars; you can't expose "unscheduled" as a checkbox in Google or MS365 calendars.)

You can also expose the field you're using for "unscheduled" in the custom fields drawer in DayBack. If you format this field as a checkbox, you'll be able to send an item to the unscheduled list by clicking that checkbox and then clicking save.

MS365 Calendars

As with Google Calendar, you don't need to do anything in field mapping to enable "unscheduled," though you do have to turn on unscheduled for each calendar as described in step 2. above. IN MS365, the flag for an item being unscheduled is stored in categories as "DayBack Unscheduled." This means you can make an item unscheduled in MS365 itself by applying that category to an event.

Changing the Display of Unscheduled Items

Overview

You can change the way events appear when they're in the unscheduled list, and change the way the event popover looks as well.

Default Display Behavior

By default, unscheduled events will have the same popover they do in the calendar.

The text shown for each event will treat the first line as white text and render the rest of the event's text (up to eight additional lines) in light gray. Any CSS or HTML you add to the event display will be respected.

To the left of the item, you'll see a small dot with the status color of the event.

Customizing the Display

You'll customize the way unscheduled events display using CSS. If you haven't changed DayBack's CSS before, you'll find an introduction here: Editing DayBack's Appearance. The key to modifying the display of items and popovers in the unscheduled list is that these items are wrapped in their oen unscheduled-specific CSS classes.

The list itself is wrapped in a class named "unscheduled." Use that to style items in the list or to change which fields show up when an item is unscheduled. For example, you may want to show the location of an event when it's in the unscheduled list but you don't need to see that once it's in the calendar. You'd give that field a class name like "loc" and then use this CSS to show it in unscheduled and hide it in the calendar (make sure the unscheduled part comes after the calendar part):

.calendar .loc {
    display: none;
}
.unscheduled .loc {
    display: block;
}

The popover is also wrapped in the unscheduled class, so you can have the popover behave differently when an item is unscheduled. Maybe you have a custom button in your popover called "Ship Order," and you want to remove that button when an item is in the unscheduled list. Give the button a class named "shipOrderButton" and then use this code to remove it from the popover when the item is unscheduled:

.unscheduled .shipOrderButton {
    display: none;
}

Remove fields from the popover the same way. Maybe the date and time fields don't make sense for an unscheduled event. You can hide them like this:

.unscheduled .dateTime {
    display: none;
}

The same classes work for tooltip items, so you can also have those look different for unscheduled events.

Custom Actions and Behaviors for Unscheduled Items

You can read and write an event's unscheduled property in your custom actions as you would any other event property. The syntax is event.unscheduled and it's supported in the dbk.addEvent() and dbk.addEvents() helper functions. More on these functions here.

Misc Items

• The unscheduled list is not shown in Public Bookmarks.
• We've updated the tooltip function to make tooltips look better in the unscheduled list. If you added tooltips to your DayBack before Unscheduled was released (April 4th 2023), you may want to use the new syntax that includes "edit: event" published here: tooltips.
• In FileMaker, choosing to sort unscheduled events by creation date (not start date) will work, but DayBack will first sort these by FileMaker tablegit and then by creation date.