Feature Request: Create Copy of Event 1 Week, 2 Weeks, 4 Weeks, etc.

[WhoWhatWhen]

Like most everyone, dealing with how Outlook handles exceptions to recurring events (and especially ending a recurring series) can be a pain when you're syncing your data between devices. So I'm contemplating trying to minimize my use of recurring events so that I can better trust my Calendar data.

One thing that would help immensely is if DJO had the ability (ideally in the tap-and-hold context menu) to create user-defined patterns (preferably as many as the user wants) of when to copy a Calendar event to. I have a lot of recurring appointments, where I meet with the same person at the same time on some regular interval (eg, weekly, every 2 weeks, every 4 weeks, etc.). I could more easily move away from using Outlook's frustrating recurrence function if I could easily within DJO create a copy of an event to the same time, one interval (eg, 1 week, 2 weeks, etc.) away.

So this might work like this:
-tap and hold on an existing event;
-select, "Copy To", which opens up another dialog with the list of user-defined "Copy To Patterns";
-select, "Copy To: Same time 1 week from this event" (or, if it is a by-weekly meeting, I'd select, "Copy To: Same time 2 weeks from this event");
-a dialog appears indicating my event has been copied per the above choice.

A second thing that would be even more powerful is the ability to add a # of iterations to the above functionality. In other words, in addition to copying an event to next week, I could also copy it to several subsequent weeks.

So this might work like this:
-tap and hold on an existing event;
-select, "Copy To", which opens up another dialog with the list of user-defined "Copy To Patterns";
-select, "Copy To: Same time 1 week from this event";
-in "Total Copies to Make" field (which would default to "1") I change it to 4 (so that my event will be copied to the same time each week, for the next 4 weeks);
-a dialog appears indicating my event has been copied per the above choice.

I have some Outlook macros that enable me to do the above kinds of things within Outlook, but having the above within DJO would be super-helpful towards my relying less on the recurring events functionality (and having to deal with the frustrations of how imperfect the syncing can be of those events between Outlook and DJO).

The patterns I use the most are: 1 week, 2 weeks and 4 weeks. But everyone is different, so I suggest making this customizable, as I've described above.

Also, I don't think Templates are getting at what I'm wanting, as they'd still require me to manually navigate to the correct day and time to create the new event. And even a plain old copy/paste is more time consuming than the above feature would be (as it still requires navigating to the correct time and date, and it also doesn't enable one to create multiple events at once).

I think for some users the above feature could be a great time saver!

I suppose you could extend it even further by adding the Subject field to the above interface (defaulted to the existing event's Subject), and then if the user wants to alter the Subject for the copied events they can easily do so. I personally would not tend to have need of that, but I could see others making use of it (for when you have repeating meetings, but you use somewhat different Subjects based on the meeting agenda, etc.).

Thanks for considering my idea!

[WhoWhatWhen]

Continuing conversation begun in another thread (http://www.dejaoffice.com/forums/sho...=1#post15700):

Sounds like a neat idea - kind of like Templates, but more so. Might be tough to implement, what with all the other features they want to add/improve, but good ideas!

- Tim

It's a bit like the conversation I had with the support people here regarding "what happens when you copy a repeating event". They said it copies everything, including any exceptions added to the original event. I asked why they didn't have it so that it copied it minus any exceptions, or made it optional. What you're suggesting sounds something like that.

- Tim

If I'm following you, I think what I'm suggesting is a bit different in that I'm wanting to make multiple copies of an event using a custom-defined recurrence pattern, but where the result is events which are all standalone individual events (ie, they are not connected together like a real Recurring event series is). It is a more manual way to doing recurrence, but without a true recurrence type of event, because each copied instance is a separate event (which has the benefit of avoiding recurring event series exceptions issues, but of course comes at the cost of the loss of being able to modify an entire series at once, and also of having to periodically manually "extend" the event into the future by making new copies via my suggested feature).

My proposed feature would allow me to quickly "recur", or copy, an event to X number of future instances (of the same day and time). So I actually would not see this being used to create a copy of a true recurring event series, though this feature could be used to make a copy of a single instance of a recurring event series (assuming the underlying code handled that correctly).

Does all that clarify things, or am I maybe missing some of what you're getting at?

[tbessie]

Continuing conversation begun in another thread (http://www.dejaoffice.com/forums/sho...=1#post15700):If I'm following you, I think what I'm suggesting is a bit different in that I'm wanting to make multiple copies of an event using a custom-defined recurrence pattern, but where the result is events which are all standalone individual events (ie, they are not connected together like a real Recurring event series is).....

Ah, I get it; yes, that's different from what I was talking about. My idea was that when you copy a recurring event, you can specify if it is "reset" to it's original pure form, or if exceptions or changes made in the recurrence would be copied as-is.

Your idea is also quite useful, however. One problem with it, though, is if you, for example, created a bunch of "recurring" events for a whole year or other long period. Deleting them all wouldn't be as easy as deleting a "true" recurring event. That'd be the only problem with it I could imagine, though.

- Tim

[WhoWhatWhen]

One problem with it, though, is if you, for example, created a bunch of "recurring" events for a whole year or other long period. Deleting them all wouldn't be as easy as deleting a "true" recurring event.

Yeah, that's the main trade-off. You get better consistency & reliability with syncing (since each event is stand-alone), but at the cost of the convenience of changing the whole series at once (to delete, modify, etc.).

I think this feature is most useful for recurring events that are within a certain window of time and/or # of occurrences. Where that sweet spot is will vary for each person, but I think it exists for most everyone. There are some recurring events that I will probably always use a true recurring event for (because those events never change, there's rarely an exception to them, etc.). But for some things I currently use my copy method (via my Outlook VBA script) to create events out into the next 10 weeks or so. These events are likely to be occurring most of the time, but I might occasionally make changes to individual occurrences, thus making the stand-alone copy method more appropriate here (so that I'm not having to deal with the problems of recurring event exception handling).