Single-Record Calendar View

[Andrew_Enright]

First-off, thank you for Calendar View!!!

It is great for tracking things like the drop-dead artwork release date for a bunch of jobs. But it’s not so great for tracking multiple dates associated with just one record.

Would you consider (or are you developing) a single-record/multi-field calendar view? Something like that would be MUCH more useful for calendarizing complex project management schedules with individual deliverables (like say a printed catalog or photo shoot).

As always, thanks!

A.

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi Andrew

I would guess it would be one record per milestone - this then allows you to keep tract of each, keep notes if required etc.

If your set of milestones is standard (or even if there are a number of sets of standard ones (based on a request type for example) then it would be possible to use Zapier to create them all for you when you set up a new request. This would require a little bit of Javascript in your Zaps but isn’t too hard to do.

[Katherine_Duh]

When you say “explode the DB,” do you just mean that it would create a table with lots of records and that’d be cumbersome, or do you mean more literally that you think it would exceed our technical limits? (If the latter—the volume of records in a creative requests milestones table likely wouldn’t come close to reaching our limits, so I wouldn’t worry about that.)

[Laura_Servidei]

No I meant it would create a gazillion records and would be hard to manage. I didn’t think it would exceed the technical limits.

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi Laura

In Andrew’s use case, I think it’s likely that there may be more information required foe each milestone rather just a date (I may be wrong). In his case, using a separate milestone table would enable this as well as being able to have calendars showing each milestone.

In your example I am assuming you need to hold a range of dates when an opera is being performed at particular venues? If this is correct then being able to have a calendar display this range from the pair of dates would indeed be useful an is in line with the OP.

If you need to record multiple individual dates for a show because there are days off, multiple shows on one day etc., then there may be a justification to hold this in a separate table - which would indeed give rise to a lot of records - but would also give you the opportunity to record the specifics of each show (Cast for example). You would also be able to build a calendar view which would show each.

[Matt_Bush]

Matt from Airtable here. We are currently planning out improvements to Calendar View including support for multiple date fields from the same table. You could then use this for a single-record, multi-field view by filtering it to only match a single record.

These improvements will be available in beta in a couple months. We’ll reply to this thread when a public beta is ready.

[Andrew_Enright]

Good to hear; thanks Matt!

We look forward to it. :pray:t2:

[Andrew_Enright]

@Julian_Kirkness am I correct to assume that ur proposing a record per milestone and then a linked field per job (record in our primary base)? That’d mean 1000+ fields in the new Milesrones base… maybe there’s a way to have Zapier auto-create those fields, but that’s a lot of manual entry unless there’s a way to auto-populate field values per milestone, leveraging some sort of template, presumably another table. Right?

[Julian_Kirkness]

@Andrew_Enright - you’re correct - but I think you mean 1000+ records in a Milestone table?

A Milestone table would allow you to monitor the progress of each Milestone and produce the Calendar you were looking for - which could be filtered in many ways as you know.

My thoughts on auto creating milestones for each new job is that Zapier would be triggered by the new job record and would then create the milestones. In my experience, this is often not as simple as it sounds because there are probably different types of Job and each would have a different set of milestones with different timings. If this set of milestones is totally variable then I think they would best be created manually - but you could save some effort by having a table of Milestone Types from which you could pick the milestones you want for a particular job.

Here’s an example I’ve been playing with:

The calendar is filtered showing only outstanding Milestones - whereas the grouped view is ideal to use for tracking progress and ticking things off as they get completed - notice I have grouped by Client and then Job.

If you wanted to automate set up of standard Milestones and these varied by the type of Job, you could add a Job Type table and have a field which would contain all the relevant standard Milestones for that Type. Zapier could then read this list and create them for you. Note that you would need to add some timing information (i.e. how long after the job start should a milestone typically happen) and also consider if the 5 or 15 minute delay on this happening via Zapier is acceptable (hopefully Airtable will enable Instant Zaps at some point to get round this though).

I have set up this type of Zapier integration before for a client and it seems to be working quite well for them.

[BenInDallas]

This request sounds parallel (if not identical) to my recent request for what I called a “nested table” field type.

New Field Type: Nested Table Product Suggestions

As we’ve been testing AirTable for our business’s project management needs, one thing we’ve had trouble setting up is something like an expense report, purchase order, or mileage report. Our typical reports would be a single printable document with several standard pieces of data (job name/number, purchase date, vendor info, billing method, etc), and a table containing purchase info (item, qty, price) with totals at the bottom. In Airtable, you can currently accomplish something like this with…

The basic idea is allowing for more complex data stored within a single field. This would certainly be applicable to a series of dates, or (in my case) an itemized cost list, or really anything that could be displayed in tabular form.

[Sabrina_Herring]

Hi Matt!

This is excellent news. Any idea when a Beta with Calendar View including support for multiple date fields from the same table will be available? If we can have this feature, we’ll be an immediate customer!

Thanks in advance!