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!

2 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