To install the Calendar application on your portal, follow these steps:

 

1. Log in to the portal using your administrator account.

 

2. Create a new public page called Shared Calendar under either the Fundamental or Technical community. Or you could create a general page that’s accessible to both groups.

 

3. Select the Add Application menu item.

 

4. Open the Collaboration category and click the Add link associated with the Calendar application

 

To set up an event, follow these steps:

 

1. View the Calendar application, which initially shows the calendar for the current system date

 

2. Select the date on which you want to set the event.

 

3. Click the Add Event button. You will see the screen shown in Figure 8-3.

 

 

4. Select the date and time for the event.

 

 

10. Next, you will set the permissions on this event. When you click the Permissions link, you will see the menu for setting permissions for Community users and Guest users. You will be able to set Delete, Update, and View permissions for each type of user. You can also enable the user to assign or deny permissions to others by using the Permissions check boxes.

 

11. After you have entered the desired information, click the Save button.

Because many users share the calendar, it’s likely that you’ll have multiple events scheduled on the same day. To add more events, follow the procedure you used to add the first event:

 

Some events that you define in a calendar have a repetitive nature. For example, an introductory one-day course on technical analysis might be offered on the first Monday of every month. Rather than defining 12 individual events for this training course, you can define the event only once. Let’s look at the steps to do this:

 

1. Select the start date of the event and enter all of the event’s required details.

 

2. Under the Save button on the event-entry screen, locate the Repeat tab

 

3. Choose whether to repeat the event on a Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly basis. If you select the Weekly option, for example, the event would be shown every week on the same day of the week in the shared calendar. Alternatively, you can choose not to repeat the event. In this case, the event would be offered only once on its start date.

 

4. When you repeat an event, you also need to set up the end date beyond which the event will not be offered. You specify the end date by selecting the desired date in the End Date portion of the screen

 

5. If you don’t want to specify an end date, mark the No end date radio button. This means that the event will recur indefinitely.

Typically, an event is announced in the shared calendar a few months before its scheduled start date. To prevent users from signing up for an event and forgetting about it later, you can send reminders to the registered users. You can set up reminders on an event in the Reminders tab at the bottom of the event-entry screen

 

You can implement up to two reminders for each event:

 

 

c. AIM: The user is notified on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

 

d. ICQ: The user is notified on her ICQ messaging service.

 

e. MSN: The user is notified on her Windows Live Messenger account.

 

f. YM: The user is informed on her Yahoo! Messenger service.

 

4. You also have a choice of not sending a reminder at all. Do this by selecting the Do not send a reminder radio button.

The Calendar application allows you to view the available events in six different modes: 

 

• Summary  
• Daily  

• Weekly  

• Monthly  

• Yearly 

• All 

The Summary view displays the following: 

 

• The event date, which is the selected date in the calendar
• The calendar for the month in which the event is taking place
• A list of events scheduled on the selected day 

The daily view, accessible through the Day tab, displays all the events scheduled on a selected dateThe selected date appears at the top of the screen with two arrow buttons on either side. Clicking these buttons allows you to navigate to the next and previous days. When you navigate to a new date, the list of scheduled events at the bottom of the screen updates accordingly.

By default, events of all types appear in the list. You can filter the list by event type by selecting the appropriate type in the All Events drop-down box.

The daily view also allows you to add a new event for the currently selected day. You do this by clicking the Add Event button. You can also perform a few actions on each event displayed in the list; I’ll discuss them in the section “Performing Actions on Events.” 

The weekly view, accessible through the Week tab, displays the calendar for the selected week. For each day of the week, the table lists all the events for that day 

 

As with the daily view, you can navigate to the next and previous week by clicking the two arrow buttons on either side of the current week 

 

You can also filter the list by event type using the same All Events drop-down list that you used in the daily view. If you wish to add a new event on a particular day in the displayed week, you can do so by clicking the + icon next to the date in the first column of the table. 

In the monthly view, accessible through the Month tab, you can see all the scheduled events in a selected month.

As in the other views we’ve discussed, you can navigate to a different month using the two arrow buttons on either side of the current month. You can also filter the output by event type and add a new event by clicking the + icon associated with the desired date.  

The yearly view, accessible through the Year tab, displays the entire year’s calendar 

 

As you might have noticed, no events are displayed onscreen in the yearly view. So how do you know what events are taking place throughout the year? In this view, the current date is highlighted with a square around it and each date is underscored. The dates on which the events are scheduled carry a dot underneath this underscore (except for the current date). The display for the month of February is shown in Figure 8-16. 
 

 

In Figure 8-16, the calendar indicates that events are scheduled for February 13, February 17, February 20, and February 28. Click any of these dates to see the scheduled events for that date.
As in the other calendar views, you can navigate to any year by using the two navigation arrows, and you can filter the display by event type. 

Selecting the Events tab displays all the events defined in the shared calendar 

 

In this mode, the application displays the date, time, title, and type for each registered event. The Actions button to the right of each entry allows you to perform several prelisted actions on it, as I’ll discuss in the section “Performing Actions on Events.

You’ve now seen several different ways to view the events defined in the shared calendar. Most of these views either display the title of the event or give you an indication that some event is scheduled on a particular day. When you click the link provided, you can retrieve the full details of the concerned event.

 

Here you will see the date and time of the event, its duration, its title, its description, and its type. This view also displays the end date if the event continues over multiple days.

When you list the events onscreen, you can perform certain actions on each one:

 

• Edit
• Export
• Permissions
• Delete

 

The action-selection menu appears when you click the Actions button

 

The Edit action opens the event in the event editor, which you used while creating a new event. You can use this editor to make any desired changes to the event. When you save the edits, the changes will be immediately reflected in the subsequent display of the event.

The Export option allows you to export the selected event. The events are exported to a file of type iCalendar, which carries a file extension of .ics. You can export the events and later import them into some other instance of the calendar. You can also import the events into apps that can read .ics files, such as the Mac’s iCal program. I’ll discuss how to import and export events in the next section.

The Permissions action opens the screen that lets you set up user permissions. You’re quite familiar with this option by now, as you have studied it in the context of Liferay’s other applications. You can set permissions for users with Regular and Community roles. The typical permissions available for the Guest role are View, Delete, and Permissions. The typical permissions available for the Community role include View, Delete, Permissions, and Update.
The Delete action allows you to delete the currently selected event—after you confirm your intention to do so, of course.

Over time, your users might create a large number of events, and you might want to import these events into another instance of the calendar. To accomplish this, you first need to export the events to a file. The Calendar application allows you to export and import event data easily. Start by selecting the Export/Import tab on the main application screen

 

You’ll notice that the default file name appearing in the edit box at the top of the screen is liferay.ics. If you stick with this file name and click the Export button, Liferay exports the data into a file called liferayxxxxx.ics, where xxxxx is a counter. The application maintains this counter internally. It also includes this counter in file names that you create yourself. For example, if you rename the export file to MyEvents.ics in the edit box, Liferay saves the file as MyEventsxxxxx.ics, where xxxxx is the counter. In any case, the application exports all the calendar data and stores it in a new file.

You can later import all the calendar data by browsing to the file name in the Import portion of the screen and clicking the Import button.

To configure the Calendar application, click the Configuration icon in the main application window. You’ll see the typical tabbed options listed here:

 

• Setup
• Permissions
• Export/Import
• Sharing

The Setup tabbed option allows you to configure the formats for your mail-notification messages and control the settings of the output display. You will be able to adjust the following settings in this tabbed option:

 

• Email From: In this option, you can set the sender information for the mail notifications. You will need to enter the sender’s name and e‑mail ID on this screen

 

• Event Reminder Email: You can configure the message format for the reminder e‑mail in this option. On this screen, you can set the subject and the body of the e‑mail message. The format uses several predefined tags, which are listed below the Body field
 

• Display Settings: You can control the display output using the various settings provided on this screen

 

You must have noticed so far that the Calendar application screen opens with the Summary tab selected by default. You can change this default by selecting the appropriate tab name from the drop-down list of Default Tab settings in the Display Settings screen.

To customize the look of the Summary page itself, you can adjust three settings in the Summary Tab area of the Display Settings screen:
 

• Orientation: This can be either Horizontal or Vertical. The default is Horizontal, whereby the calendar and event list appear side by side on the Summary screen (see Figures 8-5 and 8-9). Selecting the Vertical orientation arranges the calendar and event list vertically, with one on top of the other

• Show Mini Month: Enabling this option results in the display of the monthly calendar on the Summary screen.

• Show Today’s Events: Enabling this option results in the display of today’s events. If this is disabled, no events are displayed on the Summary screen.

The Permissions option allows you to set up application-level permissions for its users. As usual, you can set permissions for Regular and Community roles. Under Regular roles, you can grant or deny the following three permissions:
 

• View: Granting this permission enables the user to view the shared-calendar portlet.

• Configuration: Granting this permission allows the user to adjust the configuration settings on the shared-calendar portlet.

• Export All Events: Granting this permission allows the user to export all the sharedcalendar data to a file. You can later import this file back into the shared calendar, into another instance of the shared calendar, or into any other application that supports the iCalendar data format.

Under Community roles, you can grant or deny the three preceding permissions, plus the Add Event permission. The Add Event permission allows the user to define a new event and add it to the calendar.

Selecting the Export/Import tabbed option on the Configuration screen lets you configure the settings that come into play when you export event data using the Export/Import tab of the main application screen. On this screen, you can decide what fields to export.

The fields that you can export to a file are as follows:
 

• Setup: The configuration settings of your shared calendar

• User Preferences: The user-preference settings in your calendar

• Data: Either all the data, or data in a specific date range

• Permissions: The permissions, classified into two categories:

• Permissions Assigned to Organizations, User Groups, Roles, and Communities: This option is the default. All these permissions would be saved to the exported file along with the event data.

• Permissions Assigned to Users: By marking this check box, you can save userpermission data to the exported file as well.
 

After you have selected the desired fields for export, set a desired name for the file under which you wish to save the data. You can use the default file name, which includes the current date for easy identification

 

The data that you exported to a physical file in the previous section can be imported into the same instance or a new instance of the shared calendar. You can accomplish this using the Import tabbed option. To import the data, you first need to enter the name of the data file in the file-name field. Then you need to select the fields for import. These are as follows:
 

• Setup: This field contains configuration settings of the previous calendar stored in the backup data file.

• Archived Setups: Calendar data that is exported to a file consists of the current settings plus all previous settings that are archived every time you save the data. Selecting this option allows you to import all such archived setups along with the current settings.

• User Preferences: This field contains the user-preference settings of the previous calendar.

• Delete portlet data before importing: Selecting this option starts the calendar with a clean slate; that is, all the existing data would be deleted from the calendar and the new data from the archived file would replace it.
 

• Data: Here, by default all the event data is imported. You have to decide on two types of strategies while importing data; I’ll discuss these shortly.

• Permissions: By default, all permissions related to organizations, user groups, roles, and communities would be imported. You can optionally select to import the permissions assigned to users.

 

Now let’s return to the two types of data-import strategies I just mentioned: the data strategy and the user ID strategy. With the data strategy, you have two options: you can either copy the data as new data, or mirror the data instead.
If you choose the Copy as New option, the data is imported as a new item. So the first time the data is imported, a new event entry will be created for every archived entry. The next time the data is imported from the same file, an additional entry would be created for the same event. So you’d have multiple copies of the same event when you import the file multiple times.

 

Now suppose you mirror the data instead. The first time you import the data, a new entry is added for each imported event and a link to the original event is created. The next time you import data from a file, the newly added entry is updated and no additional entries for the same event are created.

You also need to choose a user ID strategy for importing data. Because the user who originally created an event may or may not exist in the new instance of the portal, you need to choose one of these options:
 

• If a user ID does not exist in the new calendar instance, then use your ID in place of the missing ID.
• Regardless of whether the user ID exists in the new system, always use your ID while importing data.
 

After selecting the desired fields and strategies, click the Import button to import the data to your calendar.

The Sharing option produces the code that you can embed in other web sites to make the application available elsewhere. It also allows you to share the application on Facebook.