Hey all,

I'm new to Planner.NET and looking for some help or advice on a few issues.

I am from a company that has written our own scheduling facility and we are planning to use Planner.NET as our drag & drop interface.

Since most of our customers are manufacturers we use the 'resource view' to display each resource / machine the customer has and the jobs that have been scheduled for them.

So my questions (as the title would suggest) is:

1) Does Planner.NET allow for resource groups

Alot of our customers have machines / resources that are similar or interchangable.  They would put them into a resource group with the idea of saying "Put this job onto ANY resource within the same group".

I've looked at locations & contacts but they seem more of a lateral relation rather than a 'parent / child' relationship.

The idea is to allow the user to 'expand' a resource group, and then see each resource within that group.  The control of moving the job between resources within the group will be controlled programmatically but the user view of a parent group is what we need and can't seem to find.

2) Set hours within a day as 'out of bounds'

Within our system we allow the user to specify the resource capacity in the number of hours in a day / shift.  In planner.NET each day is 24hrs but I can't seem to find anyway to say for 'x' day only allow between '6am - 6pm' and on 'y' day to only allow '6am - 1pm' etc. 

This would also apply to weekends etc and prevent the user from dragging & dropping onto the 'restricted' areas of the schedule - preferably with a colour change or some UI indication of the restricted nature of that time block.

3) Move resource override.

I have found that there is a keypress that the user needs to press to allow a job to be dragged to a different resource.  Is there anyway to disable this so that the user DOESN'T have to press the key in order to allow a resource change?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks Meppy.

1) Thats a shame, but thanks for giving me an answer (at least I can pass it on to my bosses to shut them up

2) I am already using some code with the 'ItemModifying' event so I am fine with that, but I would like to see how I could change the colour / layout of the schedule to show 'disabled' areas. Is it possible to change the item colour by hour? (Just an example code will be fine, no need to bother with a full blown application

I would imagine the only way I could provide this information would be to check everytime a user moves into a 'restricted' area and prevent the move?

(Edit: Hmmm.. thinking about it if I load up the 'capacity' information I can check if the 'hour' section is a selected 'out of bounds' colour and stop the move?)

3) Thanks - I will change my code

The DateStyle can indeed be used for validation and coloring but only in day-based views such as WeekRange and SingleMonth, it is not supported in the Resource view. A small application illustrating how to perform resource-based coloring and interaction validation in Resource view can be downloaded from here:

https://mindfusion.eu/_samples/_sample_Resources.zip

The application uses very simple definition for the restricted hours.

Regards,
Meppy

Here is an updated version of the sample which handles partial cell coloring:

https://mindfusion.eu/_samples/_sample_ResourcesVB.zip

The new version is also written in VB (which I presume you are more proficient with).

Regards,
Meppy