Calendar Analytics

Introduction to Calendar Analytics

Analytics adds a chart to your calendar to quantify data across the days, weeks, and months you're looking at.

The chart responds as you reschedule items so you can quickly see if your plans are lining up with your goals. Now you can see the consequences of your decisions right in the calendar. (You'll find some schedule-balancing examples here: Calendar Analytics)

Analytics is designed to answer questions like these:

Charting Data: What Can I Measure?

There are three options for charting your data.

1. You can chart the values in any additional field you've added to your calendar.
2. DayBack will also chart the number of items: it will count how many events you have each day, week, etc.
3. Or you can have DayBack add up the duration of your events. 

Additional Fields

Select this first option, and you'll see a list of the fields available for analysis. This will include the additional fields in any currently selected source along with the title and description fields. You'll see just the fields you've set up as text or number fields--those are the only kinds DayBack can perform math on. And when it comes to text fields, DayBack can only include them in the chart if all they include is a number. So if your text field contains solely "6," that will get added to that day's/week's total; if the field contains "6 lawnmowers," it won't be included.

You're selecting the label of the field that you assigned when you set up the additional field in DayBack: this is the label that shows to the left of the field in DayBack's popover (except for the built-in Title and Description fields, which are just called "Title" and "Description"). So if you elect to chart on a field labeled "Est Hours," DayBack will include values from any active calendar source where there is an additional field named "Est Hours," even if the actual fields in the different FileMaker tables or Salesforce objects have different column names.

This means that if you give your additional fields the same names in DayBack, you can aggregate data across different calendar sources. Pretty cool.

For multi-day events, DayBack will apportion the field value across each day. So if you're charting an additional field named "Est Hours" and have 20 hours estimated for a 4-day event, DayBack will count 5 hours of that estimate against each of those four days.

Number of Items

With this option selected, DayBack will chart the number of events for each day, week, or month. It's simply counting all the events you've filtered into view. For example, if you have installation teams that can install 5 units per day, you can set the threshold at "5" and easily see which days your installers may be overbooked. 

Duration

Like the "number of items" option, this setting asks DayBack to count up the events you've filtered into view, but it counts their duration. So if you're blocking off time to work on a presentation, you can filter for "Presentation," and DayBack will tell you how much time you've blocked off over the next few weeks.

Breakout Your Data By Resource or Any Field

Analytics are available in every calendar view except for month. So your data will already be broken out by resource on the "Resource" views. These views show a row or column for each resource and let you drag events between resources to balance your schedule. You'll see a line and a subtotal for each resource.

This blog post offers three short videos showing how analytics can help balance your schedule: Calendar Analytics.

Horizon view offers some additional options, including the ability to breakout by Status and Calendar. Select "More" to breakout your schedule by any field, including custom fields. 

Number Formatting

Formatting lets you apply a prefix or suffix to your numbers so they can look more accurately like currency. You can also control the number of decimal places that show on the chart: leaving decimal places blank will show the numbers at whatever decimal precision they have in your original records.

DayBack applies some styling to the number labels automatically, such as reducing the size of the "after" label if it's more than a single character. You can override some of this in DayBack's CSS.

Here are the classes you can target to change how the before and after labels appear. "label-short" is used when the value in formatting is a single character; "label-long" is used when it's more than one character. 

.label-after-value.label-long
.label-after-value.label-short
.label-before-value.label-long
.label-before-value.label-long

Threshold: Charting Against Goals

The orange dotted line in the screenshot above is the threshold for your chart. It's optional, and it's used to quickly show if you're meeting your goals. To turn the threshold off, clear the "Value" field in the setting's Threshold tab (don't set it to zero). 

Setting the Threshold Dynamically

You may want the threshold to change depending on which resources are selected or to change over time based on a query to Salesforce. To set the threshold, set the "measureThreshold" property in the config object. Create a "Before Calendar Rendered" app action and put the following in there...

const config = seedcodeCalendar.get('config');
config.measureThreshold = 50;

Threshold Colors

You can change the appearance of the threshold in settings or by manipulating DayBack's CSS. The reason to use CSS if you'd like to go further than the options provided in settings or if you'd like to set up calendar-specific threshold appearance. For example, you may have one source, Forecast Revenue, where crossing the threshold is a good thing, and you'd want the threshold green. Another source may represent your production capacity, and crossing the threshold would mean overscheduling your team: that threshold would probably be one of the caution colors like orange.

You can make calendar-specific CSS by including the name of the calendar as a class, so you can create a threshold style for each source. For example, here's the CSS above set to only apply to a calendar named "Sales Forecast" (use the case-sensitive calendar name with spaces and the "@" sign removed):

.SalesForecast .ct-area.ct-threshold-above {
    fill: orange !important;
}

If you'd like to make the changes in CSS, here are the current values for the threshold line:

.threshold-line {
    stroke: orange;
    stroke-dasharray: 15;
    stroke-linecap: round;
    stroke-width: 4px;
}

.ct-area.ct-threshold-above {
    fill: orange !important;
}

Turning Analytics Off

You can turn this feature off by adding the following CSS to DayBack. This will remove the round button used to bring up the chart:

.measure-button-container {
	display: none !important;
}

Note that you can remove Analytics from shares by simply adding .share-only above, so the first line reads .share-only .measure-button-container {

If you want to show the chart but not let people adjust the chart settings, you can remove the settings cog with this:

.measure-settings-show {
	display: none !important;
}

If you're hiding the settings cog, you should also go to "Administrator Settings" -> "Views" and then setting "Show Measure Settings" to false. That way, it won't show settings by default when showing a chart.

Limitations

Calendar Analytics currently employs just one chart type (the line chart you see above). If you have use cases that call for more, please get in touch and tell us about them. We look forward to expanding analytics based on your feedback.