Add recurrent items within a date-range

Using the discourse-calendar-and-event, my fellow students and I were missing a feature that we think would improve the benefit of this plugin greatly.

Imagine this case:
We are using a calendar topic in order to organize the usage and occupancy of a specific room.
For twelve consecutive Wednesdays, the room will be occupied by a course from 10 AM till 3 PM, except for one Wednesday.

As of now we see two options to add recurring items that have a start -and end-date:
We either post each date individually - which clutters the topic and is tedious work - or we add it as a recurring item and just accept that it will go on forever, displaying courses that aren’t really happening (which creates demand for another calendar-app or some kind of commenting).

Also: You only get the option to create a recurring item when you don’t specify an end-time:

2023-11-22T09:00:00Z
[date=2023-11-22 time=10:00:00 timezone="Europe/Berlin" recurring="1.weeks"]

For our use case, end-time is kind of crucial. The resulting calendar entry will go on forever into the future as well as into the past.

I imagine two ways to add this feature to insert time/date:

  1. When you specify a date-range that exceeds two days, you get the option to specify multiple exceptions by patterns like Fridays, Weekends, Holidays, or by individual dates.
    This would neglect start -and end-time of the individual occurrences, but still offer a viable solution.
  2. The option for recurrence should be preserved, when specifying an end-time that has the same date. Then, when choosing recurrence, there’s an option to specify an end-date, marking the last occurrence. The starting-date should be the first occurrence of the recurring event.

I hope this is understandable and someone can relate and help us achieve this.
Thank you for your great work!

3 Likes

I just now realized another option to solve this for our individual use case:
As students we can download .ics files for specific courses, containing all occurrences within the semester.
So I guess another solution would be an option (for admins) to import these files somehow.
This probably calls for a different feature-request?

1 Like

I would like to also express my interest for such a feature.

The use case is a forum built for a school, where each class has its own category and we would like to maintain a calendar in a topic, where everyone can add some entry be replying to the topic and using the “insert date”.

Contrary to the Create event dialog where you can specify an end date, the Insert date / time dialog does not have the option to specify an end date.

I’m crossing my fingers but I’m not sure if this is a common request given that we are only 2 on this topic.

I just drop my vote here because it’s very useful, and by the way, that seems to be something peeking into Discourse :slight_smile:

Recurring events have their momentum on Meta: Create individual event topics for recurring events - #18 by Ethsim2

Also, more related: 📅 New Calendar Feature: End Date for Recurring Events - #10 by MiniForum