Calendar Application in Visualforce

Check this out (click to enlarge)! It’s my latest Visualforce application, written with a little help from Ron Hess (Developer Evangelist, Salesforce.com).

Background: Our Customer Support organization schedules periodic Maintenance Windows with our customers. During these scheduled events (usually late evening / early morning), our Support team assists the customer with hardware / software upgrades, mass configuration changes on their equipment, or other “professional services”. Like any organization, we are resource constrained, so we must be careful to not overlap more than 2-3 maintenance windows during the same time period.

Project Need: The Support team wanted an application that allowed them to view all maintenance activity in a monthly calendar format.

Here’s a screenshot of the custom tab, which uses Visualforce and Apex in it’s design. In Calendar mode, the user can see all the activities scheduled for the entire month. They can view activity from previous months, or future scheduled activity, at the click of a mouse.

Each scheduled item is color coded, based on the status of the maintenance activity:

- Black: Requested
- Blue: Scheduled / Resource Assigned
- Green: Success
- Red: Fail / Problems Encountered
- Olive Green: Cancellation

The color-coding updates automatically, whenever the case detail record status changes. For instance, when scheduled (blue) activity is finished, the Support Tech updates the status field in the Maintenance detail record. When this Calendar page is refreshed, the URL link to that activity changes from blue to green.

The Support Managers find this format much more practical than the custom Report / Dashboard views we had created for them previously. Those reports/dashboards provided the same information, but seeing the data in Calendar format is so much easier for them to see what's happening, and when.

This view helps prevent the scheduling of too many maintenance windows in a single night (although I'm going to add an Apex trigger to more tightly enforce that). The Calendar view also allows the support managers to look back at previous months, and see the volume of activity they've worked, including customer cancellations, failed activities, and successful acitivities. The data has always been in Salesforce, we're just displaying it in a different, more intuitive format -- and that's made a huge difference.

I mentioned earlier that this application was written with the help of Ron Hess. In truth, Ron unknowingly helped “jump-start” this project with his detailed post on the Salesforce.com Community forums. It's an old post, dating "way back" to April 2008. In that post, Ron provided some source code for a small calendar application he was using in conjunction with the Event object. I took snipets of that code, expanded on it, and my own calendar page then fell together quite easily.

That’s another great feature of Salesforce.com – the community forums are a great resource for getting information, ideas, and project “jump starts”.