A Schema, and Calendar conundrum

I think i’ve run up against a limitation of coda’s calendar’s…
I’ve read many times people asking about wanting calendars from two tables in one calendar.
And the answer has always been to redesign the schema.

I completely understand this solution… but riddle me this!

My schema involves
Projects
which can have multiple tasks associated with each project
which can have multiple bookings associated with each task.
So three separate tables.

I’d like the start/end dates of my projects AND the times of each booking (usually just half day bookings) to show up in a calendar view.

Can anyone suggest a schema that would combine this data into a single table? I feel like it would get extremely massive if I ended up going that way…?

OR - is there potentially another way? Is it now possible to display data from more than one table in a cal?

OR - should I just use gcal - and send the info there? (This looks like being a viable solution, as I can send to 2 different gcals but just display them both at the same time. We are lucky in that the small business has gsuite to run all our email/cals up to this point!)

Hope I’ve made sense. Cheers.

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Hi @Brendan_Woithe,

I think my personal preference here would be to sync the different calendars to G-Cal. This is a somewhat easier solution to setup and I’ve grown to rely on the calendar notifications on my phone.

Another option is to create an “overall booking” for each project that would show the project start and end date while still being in the bookings table. If you go this route, you could create a column for “Booking Type” so you can designate which rows are actual bookings and which rows are Project dates.

There are options for schema for sure, but if you’re used to G-Cal, I’d say make use of it and you’re not really losing anything since it can all be synced to Coda as well.

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I agree with @BenLee.
But if you want to keep everything in coda, you can make another table that contains only Start and End Dates. I made a CODA showing how to accomplish this:

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Oh both of these are excellent and worth looking into! :slight_smile: Thank you muchly. Will report back.

(I have sync to google cal working automatically… but not coming back yet if I alter a booking in gsuite. have not had time to completely try all my ideas out yet though.

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Regarding GCal - that can really only be done using automations though right - which seem flaky in terms of how quickly the info gets through?
Often bookings can change quite quickly, and the various people involved with bookings need to be informed straight away.
However - on the plus side for GCal, it has a reminder(notification) system which is very much lacking (from what I’ve seen) inside coda.

There are some difficulties in working with G-Cal. If you’re updating events in both places, you’ll want to make sure you re-sync your Coda table to pull in any new updates from your calendar. And G-Cal isn’t super friendly with “rapid fire” updating through their API. For most instances though, I’ve see it work very well.

Coda’s notifications are not built into the Coda calendar functions. Our calendar functions are actually just a table view, so the same data but in a different layout. With this, you can add your own automations and notifications depending on the circumstance you choose. So maybe when a certain row and column changes, you want to send a notification.

For me, this is a scenario where G-Cal still offers some advantages for me, so I use Coda for additional items like notes and tasks, but typical calendar functions are pushed off to G-Cal.

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