ChadSmiley Blog Things about family, life, coding, and more

Print calendar to a document

Once again Alan Lepofsky has brought us another great tip with Print calendar to a document. Curiosity got the best of me and I had to figure out how Lotus is creating the print to document feature. I was a little surprised in what I found out. The more I thought about Lotus choice of implementation actually gives developers more options.

Design Elements

First, you need the three forms as described by ajp in Alan's comments. Just copy and past the forms ( (DayCalendarPrint), (WeekCalendarPrint) and (MonthCalendarPrint) ) from the standard mail template to your new template, while you are at it copy the ($Calendar) view to your template. There is no need to make any changes to the forms unless you need to make some cosmetic changes. I did not look at the forms at all to see what can be changed. The trick with the implementation is the view and the correct fields. First lets take a look at the view.

Calendar View

View Style

It does not have to be name ($Calendar), but has to be a view style of calendar.

Columns

Here are the only columns that are needed, you can add more columns if needed but they will not be printed on document.

The first column needs to be date/time value for a calendar view, the rest of the columns are available for you to use.

Advanced tab

Yes, you can put anything you want in those columns. The catch is the programmatic column name, as see on the advanced tab.

These four columns need to be named $144, $145, $146, and $147. This was the surprise, but what a better way to allow developers to control what can be printed. I find it interesting the choice in numbers, and that they have to be these numbers. Make sure that these numbers are used any other column, otherwise the data in the first column will appear in both. I would also recommend that you put the columns in ascending order according to the programmatic name because that is how they are printed, which we have no control over. The last ($147) column is made up of an array of four elements. The default calendar view has the following order Subject, Room, Location, and Chair. Once again the four elements can have any value.

Print Settings

Each type of view has different print settings. Some of these settings control what is printed form the view and others are actually fields on the docment. Here is the break down of the settings.

Weekly Settings
	Location: element 2 and 3 of column name $147 Chairperson: element 4 of column name $147 Required invitees: field EnterSendTo Options invitees: field EnterCopyTo
Montly Settings
	Include end time: hides/shows programmatic column name $146
Calendar List Settings
	Location: element 2 and 3 of column name $147 Chairperson: element 4 of column name $147 Required invitees: field EnterSendTo Options invitees: field EnterCopyTo Detailed description: field Body

Note: If you are looking to get a little homework out of this there are some undocumented @GetViewInfo options listed on some of the columns.