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1995-05-19
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DTC - The Desk Top Calendar
Mitch Wyle
Glenn Everhart
January, 1984
The idea here is to automate an appointment calendar. Most
appointment calendars give only one of Month-At-A-Glance,
Week-At-A-Glance, or Day-At-A-Glance. DTC is an attempt to
give all of these functions in a paperless, fast, menu-driven
format.
This program is a straightforward desk calendar which is intended to
allow a person or group to manage their appointments with half hour
granularity. It requires a VT100 or other ANSI terminal, or can
use the MSDOS ANSI.SYS device driver, since that supports the necessary
cursor positioning. Data files are sequential and may be edited with
ordinary editors, or transferred easily between machines; all data
is ordinary ASCII text.
DTC initially displays a command menu. The commands accept date
arguments in any of 3 formats. The format labelled mmddyy would
translate 031584 as March 15, 1984. In this format, notice the
leading zeroes are required; otherwise the program cannot know
where fields end.
A second format is mm/dd/yy, in which one might write the date
as 3/15/84. In this case, leading zeroes are optional. Both digits
of year are however required.
The third format is the RSX-11 date format, dd-mmm-yy, in which
3 letter month abbreviations are used. In this format, the date
would be given as 15-MAR-84, which is easier yet. The date formats
may be mixed and matched.
DTC initially does not know the date; you enter it and it
becomes the default date until changed. Thus, a command to display
any date, as with the Day command (D) (see below) sets the
date to the date selected. To set the date up and examine the
appointments for today, just use the command
D mm/dd/yy<cr>
where <cr> means the return key, not the 4 letters "<cr>". This
command sets the date and shows today's appointments.
If you want to see this week's appointment times, type
the command
W<cr>
and the times currently filled in will be shown. Evening appointments
are all flagged as happening at 17:00 (5PM for those not used to 24
hour time).
To see the month's days having appointments, the command
M<cr>
can be given. This will display a calendar of the current month (with
the last and next months drawn small at the page top) with asterisks
by any dates on which there are appointments and a pound sign (#) by
the current default date.
To enter appointments on a given date and time, the command is
D mm/dd/yy hh:mm appointment text
where the D is a literal D (may be lower case too),
the date is given in one of the legal formats and is
the date of the appointment,
hh:mm is the time of the appointment, from 08:00 to
17:00 (leading zeroes in hours are needed),
and the part after the colon may be either
00 or 30. Thus, an appointment of 09:30 is
legal, but one of 09:45 is NOT (appointments
must be on half hour boundaries), and one of
9:30 is NOT (the hours must have leading zeroes).
Afternoon appointments may be entered in either 12
or 24 hour notation; they will be translated. If the
string EV is used instead of an hour, an evening
appointment is scheduled.
appointment text is any text describing the appointment. Only
60 characters are available owing to screen size limits.
For appointments longer than 30 minutes, one may use the time range
notation hh:mm>hh:mm, where the second time is after the first.
Thus a meeting running from 9:30AM to 11:00 AM could be entered as
having a time of 09:30>11:00, followed by the text. The entry is placed
in each slot automatically then.
We will now go over the functions provided by DTC.
Command Format Function
Day D mmddyy Display appointments for the given date.
Week W mmddyy Display appointment times for the week
containing the given date, from Sunday
through Saturday.
Month M mmyy Draw a calendar of the month given
(form mm/yy permitted too), showing days
with appointments scheduled.
Enter appts D mmddyy HH:MM text Enter appointment "text" on the
given date and time (time may be a range
h1:m1>h2:m2, e.g., 12:30>16:00 for
longer meetings).
NOTE:
If the default date is already set to the desired date, the
appointments may be entered in the abbreviated form:
HH:MM text or
EV text
for appointments at the given time, or evening appointments.
Time ranges may be used here too. This speeds the process of
entering activities, since the date need not be re-entered.
The + and - commands permit rapid movement in default dates
as a further aid.
Quit DTC Q Exits from DTC
Exit DTC EX Exits DTC
Year Y yy Displays year on screen (not functional
on IBM and similar machines with small
screens; DEC Rainbows can use this,
however.)
Today T mmddyy Displays reminders like Day command
but then exits from DTC.
Reminder R mmddyy Displays week's meeting times like W
command, then exits DTC
Calendar C mmyy Draws month calendar like M command,
then exits DTC.
Purge P mmddyy Erases old appointments prior to mmddyy,
permitting cleanup of calendar file.
Negate NW mmddyy Show free times available this week
NM mmyy Show days with nothing scheduled this
month (both use default date if none
supplied). Showing free time within a
Day format was deemed not useful, so
it was left out there.
File F filename Set DTC to use filename as its' data
file containing appointments. Since
an appointment file may contain pointers
to multiple other files, this permits
DTC to access files of appointments for
different people or groups. The free
time search and Locate function (below)
then allow DTC to find times when
meetings could be held among groups.
Indirection is flagged by having year
99 for the appointment, and the filename
is placed in the appointment field.
Schedule S mmddyy hh:mm text Schedule meeting at given time
with text. This command assumes that
the current appointment file has
pointers to a group's files of appoint-
ments, and that it is desired to add
the text for an appointment at the
given hour to each, without using a
series of F and D commands to drop the
notices in each serially. DTC will put
the notice in each indirected file, but
NOT in the current top-level file of
appointments. (The G command will
place notices in both the indirected
files and the top level one, and the D
command places notices only in the
top level one; the form of each is
the same.)
Locate L mmddyy nn Locates time for meetings. This command
will find times, in the week containing
the date mmddyy, when a meeting of nn
half hour intervals may begin. The
range of nn must lie between 01 and
18. The times shown are times in which
no activities are scheduled in the top
level data file or in any files to which
it points. If the date is left out, the
current date is used. For meeting
scheduling, one would use the F command
to set a file of pointers up as the
current data file, pointing to a group's
schedule files, then use the L command
to find free time, and then use the S
command to place notices of the meeting
in all files.
Reset default date +nnU Move default date forward or backward
-nnU by nn Units. U may be D, W, M, or Y for
Day, Week, Month or Year. + moves
forward, - back. If the numeric nn is
omitted, 1 is assumed, and the unit is
assumed to be the last display used.
Thus, just typing "+<cr>" after display
of a week moves forward by one week.
The nn field may be zero, one, or two
digits and is in decimal. For example,
the command
+3D
moves default date forward 3 days.
These commands do not redraw any
displays, so a new D, W, or M display
is needed next to see the new date's
appointment information.
Output O Outputs current calendar onto a file
DTC.OUT suitable for printing. Some
calendar printouts for the current date
precede the appointment list. Note this
function is rather crude but useful.
Help H Prints a short help message on the
screen (from file DTC.HLP).
132 col 132 For DEC Rainbow users who have 132
column capability, the 132 command
allows use of wide screen mode and
allows the Y (year at a glance) command
to work. The 80 command resets.
80 col 80 This command resets 132 col max width.
Note that wide screen mode is used
only for the Year display even if
the 132 command was given. The
syntax of the Y command is Y yy
(e.g., Y 84 displays a 1984 calendar.)
IBM PC and similar machines can forget
this, or go out and buy a Rainbow
to gain better displays.
POINTERS in CALENDAR FILES
The calendar file format is sequential records of the format:
YYMMDDTTTappointment text of 60 characters length
in which every record has this form, and the time TTT is in the range
(for correct files) of
080 through 170 (for 08:00 through 17:00). The third digit is always
either 3 or 0 as well, since DTC only schedules half hour periods.
Indirection is accomplished by editing your calendar file
(with any editor) or just entering an "appointment" for year 99 (by which
time somebody should have hacked some more on this to fix it up not
to mess up real appointments). The text of the "appointment" should
be just filespec=, with the = sign as the terminator of the file spec.
This will lead to the file you specified being opened and treated as
if it existed inside your own calendar file (except you need to use
the S function rather than the D function to enter appointments in
it as well as your own.)
To use DTC, you need to create an empty DTC.DAT file
first (and also any other calendar files you expect to need.)
Any method will do, including using an editor to set it up. Just
make up an empty file initially, possibly just copying from con:
with a single return.
Glenn Everhart
RCA GSD Engineering 206-1
Rt. 38
Cherry Hill, NJ 08358
1/24/84
