Creating a scheduling / calendar grid in ASP.NET.

Question

I am working on the prototype for a scheduling application on an intranet system. The application is for scheduling and tracking promotional workers at various locations on various dates.

Currently, only for prototyping, I am generating a data table of location/date, and from this I iteratively build an HTML table (asp:Table control). On visiting each cell, I query for people working that location-date and populate the cell accordingly. This is very inefficient, and will at worst be improved by querying cached data for the whole location/date grid.

I'm looking around for established patterns and techniques for dealing with scenarios like this in HTML in general, maybe a visualization library for jQuery or something, and for ASP.NET in particular, maybe a library for implementation on a GridView etc.

Am I going in the right direction with this, and if so, what recommendations are there regarding the previous paragraph?

Answer 1

As regards the user interface, I would take a look at the Telerik scheduler control and see how that one is done. You don't want table cells stretching the layout, and even filtering may not help you unless you truncate the displayed text as a link to a modal pop-up, or some kind of master-details set up.

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx

Answer 2

These controls are complex, and there are many third party vendors out there with components like these. Take a look around at some of the components available to you, as it is A LOT of work to develop a component like this yourself (we were going to attempt to do it, but realized to make it efficient and usable we needed to buy one, so we purchased Telerik).

HTH.

Answer 3

Hello I am in the same boat trying to have my own scheduler. where to start if u don t wanna use telerik?

Answer 4

Why don't you try placing the calender control on the left side and then select the current date by default. Thereafter user can select a date and you can list the data using a gridview based on the selected date-location. That should ease up the interface as well.