Per SteveM:
Outlook has a perfectly good task management system and scheduler with
popups. Why re-invent the wheel?
In the course of due diligence, I pursued that angle with the
clients - unsuccessfully.
They want reportability options that seem unavailable in Outlook
- like the ability to report on specific fields (like the cash
amount that needs tb transferred) and to highlight holiday dates
after-the-fact.
They also do a lot of repeating events where the app spawns maybe
two or three hundred reminders in response to entry of a single
parent.
Finally, "Business Days" are an issue. It's not just "Every 5th
day of the month"... It's "Every 5th business day of the month,
but adjust the event dates and reminders on-the-fly so that if
they were to fall on a weekend, they're pushed back to the
preceding Friday."
Finally, they want to keep a list of banking holidays. If an
event or reminder falls on a banking holiday (albeit a weekday),
they need that fact highlighted on reports/screens.
We don't try to forbid such dates, because the spawning process
may create events/notifications that go years into the future -
beyond the time that they know or have updated the holiday table
for.
I'm still open to suggestions on the ins-and-outs of this
situation.
I'm especially unhappy with the way I solicit information needed
to spawn dates. Basically, I make the user slog through a
number of rigidly-sequential steps depending on the nature of
repetition.
Each step reveals a new combo box whose drop down list has been
customized depending on the response to the previous step.
e.g.
-------------------------------------------------------------
- What kind of repetition do you want?
Monthly on the nth business day
- How many months do you want to repeat?
43
- What year do you want the repetitions to begin in?
2007
- What month do you want to begin in?
July
- What business day of July do you want
for the first event date
07/03
