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Gravitybox Schedule.NET
1998-2005 Gravitybox Software LLC
Page 7 of 90
Introduction
Why Gravitybox Schedule.NET?
Gravitybox Schedule is a third-party tool written in response the to the vacuum of third-
party scheduling components. Few companies have any type of scheduling software
available. The selection that is available is incomplete at best and non-functional at
worst. Many of the existing applications deal mainly with scheduling in a very narrow
context, such as employee scheduling or task scheduling. Many of these applications
display the schedules as Gantt graphs. Most people who have created schedules by
hand are familiar with the appointment book model or grid display. This appears to be
an obvious way to display scheduled information; however the lack of software that
displays information in these formats is noticeably missing.
In fill the void, Gravitybox offers a general-purpose software component that may be
used to display scheduled information of almost any type, in many, different formats.
The component will display information in the common grid format with time and dates
on opposing axes. It will also allow you to transpose the axes, as well as specify the
increments on each one. It can display an arbitrarily large schedule, allowing for years
at a time to be view and scrolled. There are conflict resolution routines that can
determine if a change will cause a conflict with other appointments. A warning may also
be given the user in this situation in his native language, if need be.
GbSchedule.NET will not only display the information in a grid with multiple
configurations but it may also be used to display scheduled information in a month view
format as well, popularized by MS-Outlook. This view allows the user to see a month at
a glance. For those who are accustomed to viewing information in an appointment book
format, they will not be disappointed because the GbSchedule.NET offers this view as
well.
Most of the functionality available may be used with little or no coding. There are many
properties that may be set to configure the behavior of the schedule. These properties
control almost all of the functionality and behavior of the software. Customizations may
be added in code. Opportunities are given to override the default behavior of the
schedule by using the provided events. There are “Before” and “After” procedures for
most events. For example there is a BeforeMove and AfterMove event. The first may be
used to cancel an appointment move. The latter maybe used for some sort of
confirmation code that an object has been moved.
In all, the component is truly general purpose. It allows the developer full control over
the display and behavior of every aspect of its existence. The control was designed to
allow maximum flexibility over almost any type of scheduling scenario.