The Calendar tool allows you to view events saved in Smartabase by day, week or month. You can see past and future events of your own or for those who you have group access to. You can only see events which have been configured to appear in the calendar and for event forms that your role has access to view.
The calendar is limited to viewing one person's events at a time. It also does not display clashes between a person's events and events planned for a related entity.
Both draft and completed records are shown in the calendar. You can also add draft records to someone's calendar from the range of forms that you have access to.
By default, events are colored based on whether the form is a draft or completed but they can also be customized to be colored based on a field within the form.
In the example screenshot above, Jamie Anderson has been selected from the drop-down menu so all of the events shown are for Jamie. The calendar includes records for two event forms - the Daily Diary form and the Training Log form. The Daily Diary records appear as green calendar blocks for every day except the 27th, which is a pale orange. This is because the record on the 27th was saved as a draft whereas the other records have been saved as completed records.
The Training Log calendar blocks differ to the Daily Diary blocks in a couple of different ways. Firstly, the blocks have different colors. This is because the event form has been configured to color the blocks based on the type of training session, which is indicated by a field in the form. The second difference is that the calendar block also includes the type of training session with the form name (e.g. Training Log Strength and Power), which is set using an event form property.
Other features of the calendar give you the ability to:
- Enter new records from the calendar.
- Edit events in the calendar.
- Subscribe to the calendar.
- Download an iCal (ICS file) of the calendar.
- Export a calendar date range as a PDF.
Enter new records from the calendar
To enter a new event from the calendar, select a person from the drop-down list above the calendar and select a blank space in the calendar on the day (if using the monthly view) or the time slot (if using the weekly or daily views) of the event. Alternatively, use the Data entry drop-down menu to enter a new record for the selected person, a different person or a group of people, based on the group that is currently loaded.
This will take you to the form selection screen where you can choose an event form and enter a record. From the event form, you can change the event date and time if required.
Edit events in the calendar
With the required data permissions, you can click through to calendar events and view or edit the record. You can also shift records between days in the calendar when using the monthly view. Hover over the start time of the event then drag and drop the event onto a new date.
If records are edited elsewhere in Smartabase (e.g. through the Reports tool or the Smartabase Athlete app), these changes will be reflected in the calendar.
Subscribe to the calendar
Subscribing to a calendar means that you are able to take a link for the calendar (which is sent to the email address associated with your Smartabase account) and add it to your own calendar software. Your calendar will automatically update to reflect changes made to the calendar in Smartabase, so this can be a useful way of keeping track of what is going on for someone without being logged into Smartabase.
To subscribe to the calendar, select Subscribe from the Options drop-down menu above the calendar. You need to customize the calendar settings in the pop-up window.
- Choose the calendar Period that you want to include in the link. You can choose from Week, Month, Year or Rolling.
- If you choose Week, Month or Year you can choose whether to also show the previous period (Show previous period) and the next period (Show next period).
- If you choose Rolling you can choose how many days before the current day and after the current day to include in the link.
- Choose whether to Save events in UTC.
- Choose whether to specify a time zone. If enabled, select the relevant country and region.
Open the link that you receive via email and copy the calendar link. Open your external calendar and follow the program's relevant documentation to subscribe to a calendar link. You will be prompted to enter your Smartabase username and password to authenticate the calendar subscription link.
Provide an appropriate name for the subscription and configure the calendar to auto-refresh every day or week.
As new entries are added to Smartabase, these will be linked to the subscription, regardless of the Period that you choose when subscribing to the calendar. To remove entries from your external calendar, delete the calendar subscription.
If you lose your access to Smartabase or to event forms or people in the calendar, events will be removed from your external calendar.
Gmail’s calendar and the web version of Outlook's calendar don't include the necessary security protocols for Smartabase calendar subscriptions, so you cannot use these to subscribe to a Smartabase calendar.
Download an iCal of the calendar
Select Download iCal from the Options drop-down menu above the calendar to download an ICS file containing a snapshot of events for either a specified date range or for the unit of time that you are viewing. If you are viewing the calendar in weekly view, the ICS file will be formatted in weeks.
Customize the ICS file in the pop-up window that appears after you select the Download iCal button:
- Choose to download the calendar for a specific Month or a Date range.
- Choose whether to Save events in UTC.
- Choose whether to specify a time zone and select the relevant country and region.
When downloading, you will need to provide your login details to confirm that you can access this iCal file. Save the file to your device.
Once the download is complete, you will be able to use your calendar software to import the ICS file. Open your external calendar and follow that program's instructions to import an iCal. Smartabase events will then be shown in the external calendar. Any event can be selected and additional details about the event may be provided, depending on how the event forms were set up in Smartabase.
ICS (often seen as .ics at the end of a calendar file) is a global file format for calendar files. It is used by calendar software such as Calendar for OSX and iOS (Apple operating systems), Microsoft Outlook (for Windows devices) and Google Calendar (for web browsers and Android devices). Smartabase supports the generation of ICS files for use in external calendar software.
Using the Download iCal feature is the best solution for extracting calendar data from Smartabase if you can’t subscribe to a calendar – for example, if you want to display a Smartabase calendar in Google Calendar.
The downloaded ICS file will not update to reflect future changes to the calendar because it is a static file. Therefore if an event is added or changed on Smartabase, these changes will not be reflected in the external calendar. Additionally, if you make a change to an event within your external calendar, the updates will not link back to Smartabase.
Export the calendar as a PDF
Selecting PDF from the Options drop-down menu will create and download a PDF version of the calendar based on the date range that you are looking at.
Privacy and confidentiality considerations
Event forms can be configured to not appear in the calendar or an ICS file by your Smartabase builder. They are also able to control which fields are shown as the summary for the record when it is viewed in a calendar or from an ICS file.
Additionally, your Smartabase administrator can restrict who has permission to view and interact with an event form in a calendar. For example, event forms that record particularly sensitive and confidential information can be restricted to being viewed in a calendar by select professional users.