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Silverlight Elements: Scheduler Control

Tagged as Products, Silverlight, Silverlight Elements

One of the larger controls that you will find in Silverlight Elements is the scheduler. This control is based on the calendar seen in Microsoft Outlook and allows users to manage all of their appointments. It could be used by students to record their class timetable details, it could be used in the office to remind you of up comming meetings, or it could be used by anyone who just wants a personal scheduler. Today we take a tour of the main features that make the scheduler control easy to use.

View Navigation

The scheduler allows the user to view appointments that occur across a particular day, week, or month. The user can navigate between each of these views in a number of different ways. The most basic way is by using the labeled buttons at the top left of the control. These will navigate to a day, week or month that is close to what the user is currently viewing. Just below the labeled buttons is a pair of left / right navigational buttons. These allow the user to stay within the same view, but switch to the next / previous day, week or month.

Within month view you will also find buttons to the left of each week, and above each day which allow easy navigation to the appropriate views. Finally, if the user finds themself looking at a view that has no appointments to display, buttons appear on the control to navigate instantly to the next or previous appointment no matter when it occurs.

Creating appointments

There are a few different ways that a user can add an appointment to the schedule:

1. One way is to first make a selection across some number of days or time slots, and then press the “Add Appointment” button at the top right of the control.

2. Hovering the mouse over a time slot for a couple of seconds will result in a button appearing that can be used to add an appointment. After clicking the button, the user can give a name to the appointment, and then press enter or click some where else with the mouse to complete the operation.

3. Double clicking on a time slot can also be used to create appointments.

During all these different ways of creating an appointment, a dialog is displayed that allows the user to set its name, start/end time, or set up a recurrence pattern. Once an appointment has been added, the user can then change its start and end times by dragging the thumbs found at each of its ends.

Customization

Silverlight Elements comes with 5 standard styles for the scheduler control. Creating your own style allows you to customize the scheduler to meet the unique requirements of your application. You could remove features such as the “Click to add item” button, or add features such as new ways to navigate between views. We have also provided ways to control the scheduler programatically, and listen for when the user interacts with the scheduler making it easy to integrate it into your application. For example, adding an appointment can be done by going through the controls Schedule property and calling the AddItem method as follows.

Scheduler schedulerControl = new Scheduler();
schedulerControl.Schedule.AddItem(new ScheduleItem
{
  StartTime = new DateTime(2010, 4, 12, 9, 0, 0),
  EndTime = new DateTime(2010, 4, 12, 9, 30, 0),
  Name = "Kick start meeting"
});

You can also remove a particular schedule item, get a list of all the items, check the currently selected item and more. If you want to know how to make your own Scheduler style, or more information about how to use the Scheduler then you can contact us through our forums or put a comment on this post.

Download a free trial version of Silverlight Elements or try out the online demo (if you have Silverlight 3.0 installed).

Want more features in the scheduler or any of the other controls? We’d be happy to hear from you in our forums, or simply put a comment on this post.

Add your comments
Posted by Jason on 6 April 2010

5 Responses to “Silverlight Elements: Scheduler Control”

1. So I just went and tried out the live demo. I have one suggestion. When you highlight a group of time slots and then let up the calendar should automatically create an event or have the dialog pop open and allow you to add details for the time slot you just selected. I did love the way it looked.

   Bret Ferrier Apr 8th, 2010

2. Thanks for the feedback Bret! We’re certainly adding this in the near future along with a bunch of other enhancements to to the scheduler.

   Appreciate your thoughts :-)

   John-Daniel Trask Apr 11th, 2010

3. Does the control provide a connection to an Exchange server?

   Kyle Russell Apr 16th, 2010

4. Hi Kylie,

   We don’t but that sounds like it would make a terrific sample for us to provide (and would prove the API was powerful enough to express what Exchange stores for calendars). Thanks for the feedback!

   John-Daniel Trask Apr 16th, 2010

5. Any plans to replicate the Scheduler control in WPF Elements?

   David Jul 2nd, 2010

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