Multiple repeating dates

I'm not completely sure multiple repeating dates in one field will work, but it might. I tried to keep the API very flexible.

Getting the current interface to work right in FAPI was very challenging -- a field that stores a RRULE strings gets dynamically expanded into a complex selection form and then the user selections are reconstructed into a new RRULE to be stored in the date field and used to compute the dates that match the rule to store them as the multiple values of that date in the database.

I thought getting that much working was pretty challenging, I think I stretched FAPI just about as far as it can go :)

Expanding on that to have multiple RRULEs, each with its own complex selection form and multiple resulting collections of dates that match the rule, hmm... I can see the use case for something like this, and I would say it is at least theoretically possible to do, but it might not be a simple thing to get all the FAPI stuff working together correctly.

The biggest advantage of Date over event + eventrepeat are that eventrepeat constructs a huge table of all the possible date values, and clears out past dates and adds future dates using cron. Then it searches that table for matches, which means you cannot create or edit repeats that started in the past, and you have a lot of overhead. Plus each match is made into a new node, which would not be desirable in this case. The date module can do computations for any date period and creates multiple fields in the original node and could also do the date computations on the fly instead of storing the results.

So I think this module is most likely the right place to start for something like this.

I would love to get AHAH incorporated into the D5 version. It will automatically happen in D6 because of the changes in CCK for D6. So I'd gladly accept a patch for that in the 5.2 Date module, for sure.

Sean recently posted that he is thinking of retiring Event Repeat because it is his impression that Date/Date Repeat/Calendar will provide a better solution:

http://drupal.org/node/177108

From what I've read in this thread, that sounds accurate. I have not had a chance to install and play with dev versions of Date and Event to see if this is already the case or becoming the case. Do you agree? Or do you think Event Repeat provides or could/should provide some additional functionality beyond what Date/Date Repeat is setting out to do?

I think Date Repeat will do the same or similar things as have been done by Event Repeat. It's actually an API that Event Repeat could use, but it would require the Date API. The Date module implements the API as a repeating date option.

The question about whether to deprecate Event Repeat is probably more about whether or not people still need the Event module, and lots are still using it. So long as the Event module exists there will probably be a need for Event Repeat.

So if the question is whether you can expect to be able to do the same or similar things with Date/Date Repeat, the answer is yes. The difference between Event and Date/Calendar is that the Event module creates only events and nothing else and does it with no requirement for using CCK or Views, while Date/Calendar builds on CCK and Views. The targeted module is easier to set up, since it has only that one purpose. The Date/Calendar combination is more flexible, but also more complicated to set up since it can do lots of different things.

Oops, this issue was actually about a different subject which is still active. Sun is proposing to make a way for multiple repeating date fields, and that is still an open feature request.

Is there any hope about this feature?

I'm using a calendar like a Class Schedule. so if I have a lecture which happens on different days of the week, but also different times, I have to create 2 nodes for both of them. So I'll have two nodes of the same lecture, and this is not practical.

Hi--
I'm hoping for a similar feature.
I have equipment reservations to track and it seems like a more flexible structure for Date (recurring bookings/reservations at irregular time intervals) would meet the need perfectly. I can try to combine it with the Resource Conflict module for an adequate solution, or perhaps the Conflict warning ability (via Node Reference) of Resource Conflict would be designed into Date Repeat because it's common problem having overlapping Date ranges for a single Content item. Thanks!

Another +1 subscribe (I hate those too. My coding skills aren't terribly flash, but I'm happy to test an implementation, if that is something that you are still willing to look at Karen.

Soli Deo gloria

I agree this would be a great feature. A sample use case for this is a class that runs every week on Tuesdays from 7 PM to 11 PM and on Thursdays from 7 PM to 8 PM. There are lots of other real-world scenarios here. Currently the only workaround is to create multiple CCK Date fields but there are limitations to this, including that multiple fields do not integrate into a single "Schedule" tab or "Repeat" rule display.

As to the comment about the difficulty in using the FAPI for this, I cannot speak to that directly, but I do have some additional thoughts on the UI which I will be documenting shortly about potential improvements to the UI, so in light of this future enhancement request perhaps there may be a reason to bundle this into a larger enhancement... I will post a link to the enhancement request in a bit; stay tuned...

This module may be of interest to people reading this thread

MERCI (Manage Equipment Reservations, Checkout and Inventory)
http://drupal.org/project/merci

MERCI does not yet handle repeating/recurring dates.

I too am looking for something like this. I was wondering if it would be possible to "add another date", where you can add multiple dates to a node, each with it's own repeating pattern.

I have come across situations where it makes sense for one node to have repeated dates such as Mondays from 1-4pm and Tuesdays from 2-5pm.

ideally you could keep adding as many dates as possible. This would be beneficial in situations where there is no logic to the way there are multiple dates i.e. an event that spans four days but each day starts and ends at different times depending on the day etc...

Has anybody found a solution to this problem? I need the same functionality (a class/course which occurs at different times on different days.)

What about some sort of a node-reference approach? Here are some rough thoughts on how this could be done:

Example: content-type: course has a CCK node reference field to a content-type called schedule. The course has all of the fields that are related to the course, whereas the schedule is just a wrapper around a single repeating date field. Although you cannot create multiple values of a repeating date, you can put multiple values of a node reference in the course, each with its own repeating date.

This would require some work with views and either theming or panels to display the nodes appropriately. Here are some further thoughts:

• Use the tab tamer module to hide the repeating schedule tab.
• Use panels to display the repeating schedule for the referenced schedule nodes by creating a view of all schedule nodes. Or, use views-attach to show the referenced schedule nodes.
• In the calendar, don't display the course nodes; instead display the schedule nodes, but rewrite the output using the fields from the referring node (using a reverse reference relationship?) This could be tough though; you'll have to somehow override the link to the node so when you click on the occurrence of the node
• To edit the course node, use one of the many methods of creating schedule type node references on the fly; there is one that allows you to do it in a modal iframe, another that uses a thickbox, and a few others...
• Use node relationships or node hierarchy or something to ensure that there is a 1-to-1 relationship between a course node and a schedule node, so that it is easy to look at a schedule node and simply rewrite the the output based on the parent node.

Some of this might not make sense, and I admit that I haven't had a lot of experience with some of these modules, but this is the idea that has been brewing in the back of my mind. One negative to this is that there isn't a single iCal rule that this wraps up into, so if you want to create a single rule for the multiple repeating rules, you'd have to write a module to bring in the multiple references and re-encode them using the specifications from IEEE.

So... does this work? It's not my highest priority, so I won't be able to put any time into it, but if it sparks anything I'd love to hear if this works for anyone.

Along similar lines, it would seem like an obvious solution to use fieldgroups for this rather than node references; the problem is, if I recall correctly, Date won't work in a fieldgroup.

I also would benefit from such a feature..

I'm building a yoga site and there's instructors that want to post MWF classes the recur each week.

I've thought of a solution for this, but it requires chopping up the node submission form and creating a bunch of extra fields.. not even sure if it will work.

Basically I'm going to try to create 7 date repeat fields on one node, and have them each correspond to one day of the week.

They'd all be hidden and the user would fill out a separate form that would then either omit or include certain date fields for each day of the week.. We'll see how that goes..

The problem remains however, that there is still a possibility that the user might want two different times to appear on one day.

EG. "every tuesday, at noon for 1 hour, and at 6 for 1 hour"

Well I gave it a shot and although i got it to work, if a single event has more than 3 days in one week, and repeats each week in one month, then the views mod freaks out when I go to view the month that has the repeating pattern.

EDIT: by "freaks out" i mean it times out my server:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded

Why would views slow down so excessively with this?

I increased the maximum execution time and restarted apache.

It worked for a bit (after about 45 seconds), but now that I have a few more multiple-date entries, I get this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 83886080 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /var/www/sites/all/modules/date/date_api.module on line 819

So it seems that there is something going on here that is terribly memory-inefficient.

What is it about these combined modules that is so heavy?

Here's what I did:

I've created a content type called recurring_week_event

Then I added 7 date repeat fields:

field_rd_sun
field_rd_mon
field_rd_tues
etc
etc

I created a form that posts a title, master start/finish datestamps, and daily time of day starts/finish.

The form posts to a php page that takes this data, and creates 1 node of type recurring_week_event.

The php page uses some of the date module date_repeat_calc along with a loop to take each posted day of the week value and create the repeating date stamps for each of the 7 date repeat fields (omitting the date fields not checked)

EDIT: I removed the large snippet that performed what is described here --- see below for working copy

This works just fine, except when the node has more than 3 days in one week, repeated for an entire month.

At this point, the node is created without a problem with the above code ( and some other code.. node_save, etc ), and is viewable in the content menu, editable and its just peachy.

But the calendar view can't handle it.

The view is set up to recognize 7 fields ( one for each day of the week )

And its using the date: Date(node) argument OR field_rd_mon OR field_rd_tues etc OR etc OR etc.

I'm guessing that something with the way views works doesn't like that I'm looking at 7 fields?

Any pointers on where I can make this more efficient?

note: if you are going to try to implement this code -- you'll need to set it up to handle your site's timezone, or set each day-field to UTC in the admin/content/node-type/... area

Sorry I just noticed we're supposed to be talking about 7.x here... I'm working with

calendar 6.x-2.2
date api 6.x-2.4
views 6.x-2.8

I got the repeating date pattern to work

In the above posts, I was working with 7 fields...

scratch that idea... the snippet below works great with just one field.

Perhaps somebody can convert this to a module -- I'm more of a post-to-a-php-page-somewhere kind of guy and am not terribly familiar with the various drupal hooks..

Essentially you want to intercept the submission of a node type, see the comments for an idea of where to put the code (and the above post for a bit more context):

Requirements:

content type with field_dates of type date with the following

• * repeat options widget
• optional "to date"
• utc timezone ( in this example )
• 2010-04-21 14:45:29 input format

<?php

/**
this anticpates a 1-day event, happening the same time every day

$_POST['day'] is an array, keyed with the php date numeric week day value

the following are declared above this snippet, determined from the posted data:

$node = new stdClass(), etc -- this is going to be the one recurring node

$ts_end = timestamp of the end time of day of the recurring date

$ts_start = timestamp of the "master start time" or the date picked that marks the beginning of the recurrance period", as well as the time stamp for the begin time of day for the recurring date

$ts_end_final = time stamp of the "master end time" or the date picked that marks the end of the recurrance period


NOTE: this is relatively untested... no checks are in place. this is just an idea

*/

//set the initial day as the numeric value of the event recurrance start date
$initDay = intval(date('w', $ts_start));

//set an integer that will act as a unique key for each repeating date value generated below
$intUniqueKey = 0;
    foreach($_POST['day'] as $dWeek => $day){
       
        //adjust the starting date depending on what day of the week this is relative to the day of the week the recurrance started
        $addDays = intval($dWeek)-$initDay;
       
        //if the day of the week here is before the day of the week of the initial recurrance, then begins the following week
        if($dWeek<$initDay)
            $addDays += 7;
           
       
        $dayRel = strtotime(date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $ts_start)." +".$addDays." days");

        //set up an RRULE to pass to the date_repeat_calc function:
        $rrule = "RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;INTERVAL=7;UNTIL=".date("Ymd", $ts_end_final)."T".date("Hi", $ts_end_final)."00Z;WKST=MO";
		
		 //use the date module to figure what the stamps are for all of the repeats relative to this adjusted date		
        $calcRule = date_repeat_calc($rrule, date('Y-m-d H:i:s',$dayRel), date('Y-m-d H:i:s',$ts_end_final));
       
       
        //take this calcRule array and push the values into the drupal object       
        foreach($calcRule as $key => $datetime){
       
            //this is the relative start time stamp for this recurrance
			$ts_startThis = strtotime($datetime);
			
            //this is the relative stopped time stamp for this recurrance, assumed to be the same day
            $ts_endThis = strtotime(date("Y-m-d", $ts_startThis)." ".date('H:i:s', $ts_end));
           
            $node->field_dates[$intUniqueKey]['value'] = "".date('Y-m-d',$ts_startThis)."T".date('H:i:s',$ts_startThis);
            $node->field_dates[$intUniqueKey]['value2'] = "".date('Y-m-d',$ts_endThis)."T".date('H:i:s',$ts_endThis);
            $node->field_dates[$intUniqueKey++]['rrule'] = $rrule;
			    
        }
       
    }


?>

After this creates the content -- you need to modify the calendar view to display the field_dates field, and accept field_dates: From along with the Date: Date(node) argument

yikes.. i accidentally changed the title of the issue... changing it back -- sorry

Also -- i'm kind of drupal.org newb, is this the appropiate place to be posting this potential solution?

subscribing

I am working on creating a class / course timetable and multiple recurring dates are very appealing to me. I love some of the ideas being thrown around here!

Subscribing. This would be very useful in my case, which is a schedule of shows being performed, and various times on different days of the week.

I would also request a back-port of this to 6.x once its done in 7.x.

Subscribing.
I could use this in 6.x as well.

Any update on this? It seems like a fairly common use case -- I know I need it!

I would really like to have this as well!

Does anybody know if this feature has been added ?

Or if there is another module to provide this feature?

Subscribing... Needed by me too.

Subscribe, although I think maybe this module does what I want: http://drupal.org/project/date_repeat_presets

Subscribing. This would be useful for a project I'm working on. If it's not done soon, I'll think about contributing code. It would be good to have some idea how hard this is likely to be.

Any movement? I'll take it up. UI wise, I'm thinking the following:
Add 'Add another repeat' button to the end of
The button behaves just like 'Add another item' button, keeping it familiar
It would add another repeat fieldset

Function:
Treat the repeat rule as an array of rules, and process it one by one using current method for one rule.

Thoghts, comments, ideas are welcome.

@hazah, I think you need to wrap something in the <code> tag, I'm not sure what you mean by:

Add 'Add another repeat' button to the end of

I meant a similar button that you get on a the date widget with a cardinality setting set to anything but 1 (such as 2,..., unlimited). That button's text is 'Add another item'. I'm simply saying, that since repeat takes that button away, another one should take it's place called 'Add another repeat'. I hope that clarifies.

If you take a look at the roadmap for D7 to D8 at http://groups.drupal.org/node/221229, you will see that the next thing on the table is to create a new 7.3 version of Date that has a lot of changes. One of the big changes is a total revamp of the way repeating dates work. With that new way of doing repeating dates I think multiple repeating dates will be quite easy to do. The 'repeating date' will be nothing but a RRULE and it will spawn the actual dates it creates as separate nodes. There could easily be multiple repeating RRULE fields on an event.

So marking this postponed as something that could go into 7.3, where it will be much easier to solve.

Does any one knows when these new features on Date Repeat API are going to be implemented?
I'm working on a new project based on D7 that supose to be some kind of Student information system for a school where student can get information for a courses they are assigned to. I'm using Organic groups to implement the "Course" content type, and date with "date repeat api" to implement the courses schedule. Because any course can be scheduled on different times during the week, I need a way that I can create multiple repeating rules for the same node. Fore example: Sunday: 10:00-12:00, Tusday: 14:00-17:00 and so on. Currently the Date repeat api, allows to add only one repeat instance and repeat it say every sunday and tusday. But there is no way to set different times for different days.
Hope to see this feature created on the next release of date module for D7. Subscribing!

I really hope this isn't redundunt, for this field to be completely generic, the feature can't be limited to "multiple repeating dates", rather, the multiplicity should come from the standard Drupal cardinality setting. What the feature should allow is to add any number of repetitions to each and every single field value. In theory, you should be able to setup an entire schedule for something from a single field, including all day events and any variants you can imagine.

Any progress on an "Add More" button to the date repeat field?

I also want to have the "add more" button on repeating dates. So I can create multiple repeating date and include some single dates too.

haha this issue was one of the first I'd ever posted to... Almost 3 years later and I've got some of the same code! It has developed quite a bit since then...

I recently put up a sandbox module that attempts to address this issue:
http://drupal.org/sandbox/tmsimont/1917664

I'm trying to get a co-maintainer or two in there -- a lot of work needs to be done to clean up the UX, permissions and other features. I basically separated out repeat patterns, dates, schedules and exclusions all into their own entities... I have a lengthy description of why and how it works on the sandbox module page.

If anyone is willing to help me out with this please let me know, I'd really appreciate it.

Exactly, one would need the possibility to add multiple dates, and for each date, the possibility to make it a repeat date.

Combined with a multiple-value input calendar widget (like eg the Availability Calendar but with time input as well), this would cover all possible schedule needs I can think of.

I'm configuring a schedule requiring the potential for multiple node dates in a single field, some of which may be repeating.

The solution I've got so far (pending changes to e.g. the Date API) is:

• Install Field Collection module
• Create a field collection field on the content type in question. (Widget: Embedded.) Allow this field collection to have multiple entries.
• In that field collection, add a Date field, configured for repeating dates. (You could also add other fields here if needed.)
• Add content, and the field collection will display as a standard date field; but you can add new field collection items to store separate date/repeat instances for the same field.

I checked the result in displays from the Calendar module.
It's working so far on a test case like: "event A occurs daily 9-10am, and also Fridays 3-5pm."

Hi guys,

for those of you who need to query for simple repeating dates (e.g. birthdays) you can use a tiny patch I've created for Views module that may help you.

It's Issue link is: #2014833: Change type of "Filter granularity" from radios to checkboxes to support views to query for repeating events

Hi guys,

for those of you who need to query for simple repeating dates (e.g. birthdays) you can use a tiny patch I've created for Views module that may help you.

It's Issue link is: #2014833: Change type of "Filter granularity" from radios to checkboxes to support views to query for repeating events

Is there something that needs to be done first in D8 for Multiple repeating Dates to be implemented ?

@lzimmerman - thanks for the idea, I will give it a shot and see how it works and report back.

I'm looking for this functionality as well for an events calendar to keep track of things like movie times that happen more than once in a day, or plays that are in the evenings but also have a matinee on the weekend. Any progress on this, or if I do the Field Collection workaround, do you think there will be a conversion later? Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer, but I can help test.

@lzimmerman: Thank you very much for the Idea ! You saved me ;)

Just to extend the awesome idea of using field collections for intricate repeat patterns, I'd like to include some additional configuration to my Calendar views as I couldn't get what I wanted out of the Calendar view I was already using for Events ( content type ).

Create a new calendar view from the template that uses your field collection with the date field as the base table.

Add a relationship, Field collection item: Entity with the Event Schedule (field_event_schedule) ( yours will be whatever your field collection content type field is ), this gives you access to the parent node so you can add fields to your view.

PROFIT!!