Duplicated Event Calendar Layer Issue

[Nat Katin-Borland]

To reproduce this error, go to the Justice Initiative Central Community (https://karl.soros.org/communities/justice-initiative-administration/calendar/day.html) and click on June 20th. On this day there is 1 occurrence of the event "ZN-NY", displayed in the NCJR Central layer. However, if you go to the set-up screen you'll see that 3 layers in this community are set-up to display events from the Zaza's Calendar community (https://karl.soros.org/communities/zaza-s-calendar/calendar/day.html): NCJR Central, Admin Central, LCD Central. Given this configuration, it should mean that the event "ZN-NY" should appear 3 times on June 20th if you select the All Layers view. This is not happening - the event is only appearing in the NCJR layer. If you drill down individually to either the Admin Central or LCD Central layer, then you see the ZN-NY event. The problem is that if users are scanning quickly on the All Layers view and only looking for the colored layer they normally follow, then they won't realize there's an event they care about on that day.

I tried to explain this as clearly as I could, but let me know if you have questions. Thanks!

[Paul Everitt (paul-agendaless)]

Balazs, can you do the first triage on this and make sure it isn't an issue in the JS or view code? If it's lower down, I can assign to Chris.

[Balazs Ree (ree)]

ok

[Balazs Ree (ree)]

Definitely not related to the js, because all the generation happens from python.

It is very likely solvable inside the view, (and without touching of the presenters) - the current code makes sure that one event is only added once, this is what needs to change according to this ticket.

A usability point. I understand that displaying the all day events multiple times in the day view, in case they are visible in multiple layers, is good for the users. However, what should happen with the non-all-day (single) events? Would it be not disturbing if the same event is shown multiple times in a given timeslot of the day view, in case it's part of multiple layers?

Also: in the week and month views, would it be not disturbing to show the same event multiple times? (because of space)

If the multiplicity of an event displayed is conditional and depends on the view (day, week or month), or, if it depends on the event type (all-day or single), then the implementation will be more complex. If the multiplicity is unconditional, then it's simpler to implement this change. All in all: this change involves a policy decision because of possible, yet unthought side effects.

[Paul Everitt (paul-agendaless)]

I'm going to ask Robert to take this one, read through the decision points, and decide what's the right plan.

[Nat Katin-Borland (nborland)]

Tom from Oxfam explains this issue pretty well (https://karl.soros.org/communities/karl-consortium/blog/two-feature-questions/):

Hi again everyone,

I have another question/feature request from the user group at Oxfam GB interested in the calendar functionality in KARL. This seems like a sensible thread to carry on the discussion.

This user group has discovered what you might consider to be a bug in the categories and layers functionality. Our IS Service Desk raised the issue with our KARL Support (Six Feet Up), but they suggested that because the impact is only apparent with a very specific use case, it is really more of a feature request to be raised in this forum.
The issue is that there is no logical sorting for categories or layers in KARL's Calendar Setup view. The list isn't sorted in alphabetical order or in the order in which the items were added, it seems to be sorted by some unique ID behind the scenes.

I can't imagine that this would cause a problem in most use cases. However, this user group at Oxfam GB wants to use layers that include categories that are also members of other layers. In this case, the colour in which a calendar event is displayed when viewing all layers is determined by the first layer in the list that includes a given category. Because the order of the list is seemingly random, there is no way to know in advance in which order the layers appear in the list, and so this user group has found that they can't get the colour-coding of different events to function in the way they want.
For example, your layers might end up like this:

Layer B (red) - Category B
Layer A (blue) - Category A
Layer D (green) - Category A, Category B, Category C
Layer C (orange) - Category C
In this case, when viewing all layers, events assigned Category C would appear in green (the colour for Layer D) rather than orange (the colour for Layer C).

I appreciate that this use case is very niche, and so I would be interested to know if any user groups at other members of the Consortium have found the random ordering of categories and layers to be a problem.

[Robert Marianski (rmarianski)]

If an event appears in multiple layers, it needs to show up multiple times, because that is the intention of the user. Balazs, to use your terms, unconditional multiplicity is what we want. This has implications for the universal calendar, as well as the community calendar, since many users may only track one layer. It's important that an event shows up in every layer it should.

We may want to consider having each event block stacked horizontally if there are multiple events in the same time block. Note that this is just for events that are not "all day". See attached to see how outlook handles this problem.

[Balazs Ree (ree)]

This is now fixed on master (branch1) with the following constraints:

- On the day, week, month views: Only all-day events, belonging to multiple layer, are shown multiple times. Because, we cannot practically display normal (not all-day) events multiple times, at the moment.

- On the list view, both the all-day and the normal events are shown multiple times. Since, on a list view this is not a problem and I think it is more comprehensive.

[JimPGlenn (jpglenn09)]

fixed