Dynamic sources for a Calendar (3.22)

Squiz Matrix Support
1

My question - how do I set up a Calendar to use Dynamic Event Sources?


I've been setting up a bunch of public calendars for our main site, comprising one overall calendar for all events of all types (pulling them from a parent "Events" folder), plus 11 separate calendars for specific event types (each pulling its events from a child folder under the "Events" folder). This is proving to be fairly time-consuming and labour intensive.



It occurred to me that there might be a better way of doing this all in the one calendar, using Dynamic sources. I note on the Calendar Page's Details screen that it is possible to configure Dynamic Event Sources using the "Replacement root nodes for the listing (must be children of static root nodes)" drop-down option. But that's as far as I can go. I have no idea what Source I should be setting, or any other information that needs to be configured, e.g. variable name, value, or whatever (assuming that's what you use in a case like this).



There's very little information in the manual - it tells you what settings are available, but doesn't say anything about what each is for, or how to configure them.



So could somebody very kindly step me through what has to happen in order to set up a single Calendar that uses Dynamic Event Sources to show different sets of events? I would really be most grateful.



Many thanks.

2

Ill give you a run down on how this works. You mentioned that everything is stored in folders so Ill tell you how to do a paint layout as well, if you already know just skip that part :slight_smile:


[list=1]

  • In your calendar that youve set up, probably best to use the one at the top thats already pulling everything (I assume youve assigned event sources and css styles to differentiate between the different items stored in the folders, if not you might want to look into this). Go to the details screeen and select replacement event source and change GET variable name to current asset and commit the details screen. If you scroll back down and look after the commit you should now have current asset and assetid under the source.
    [*]Create a new paint layout in your site and go to the details screen. Under custom asset types select folder from the dropdown menu and commit that.
    [*]Expand out the paint layout and the type format and go to the edit contents screen of the folder format.
    [*]Change the div thats there to a RAW HTML under presentation and change the content type to nest content. Commit the page.
    [*]Once its reloaded click on the change button and find the calender that youve already got created and plug it in to the div. You can ignore all the other stuff and commit it.
    [*]Go to the top folder where youve stored your calendar items and right click then go to lookup settings.
    [*]Grab the locks and then in the layout area (sorry im running 3.28 and I think this screen has changed) Change the empty area to the paint layout you just created. This should cascade over all the folders.
    [*]Youll now be able to preview your folders and the calender should be printing. If you want you can muck around with the paint layout and apply some styling to your actual calendar events (just make them customised on the details screen like you did for the folder) as the paint layout will apply to those too.

    Hope this works for you, if you need any clarification or its still busted let me know. As a note for some reason that I couldnt work out the top level folder for me was throwing an error about the root node being outside the specified area so I had to set an empty assigned css source one level above my top folder. Good luck!
    • 3

    Wow - thanks for this, Liam. I'll give it a go and let you know how I manage. (Hope you won't mind too much if I have to ask you for more help during the process…)


    Cheers.



    Steve