When an upgrade to any project is big enough, the only way to bring it to completion is in pieces. Such is the nature of the current upgrade being implemented in LIDA here in the middle of February, 2020 – the Events Manager feature.

It has taken more than a week of “just thinking about it” to wrap our arms around the overall concept of this feature, and to set it down in a document so that all the pieces of it make sense.

Here’s a quick overview of the LIDA Events Manager feature, after which I will share with you what I mean by “Major Upgrades Come in Pieces.”

Here’s a sketch of how the LIDA Events Manager operates, in a macro view: 

The “Seasons” list is optional, but will be useful to those who use it to plan out their seasons.  The other three yellow rectangles you will need to plan your EVENTS (concerts, parades, gigs, rehearsals, etc). You can add repertoire to either the Season Repertoire or the Event Repertoire directly from the familiar LIDA screens, or from the repertoire screens themselves.

The final goal is to produce an Event (e.g., Concert) Repertoire list that is exactly what you want, and that can be exported to be used elsewhere, such as in your concert programs, or in licensing reports.

As you can tell by that diagram, there are quite a number of pieces that must be in place before this feature can be operational.

And today, I finished ONE of those pieces – the form that lists the Seasons that you can use as you designate each season’s repertoire.  Here’s a preview screenshot of the List of Seasons form:

As you can see, it is quite a bit more than merely a list of concert seasons. On the far left, there’s a checkbox where you can designate any of the seasons you enter to be your “Default Season” setting, so when you click “Add this tune to current Season,” the checked season is the one it will be added to.

Following that is, as you’d expect, the designator for each season, but one of the power features of this screen are the six buttons to the right of the season’s name. There are buttons to go to a new record, move this record to the top, move this record up one, move this record down one, move it to the bottom, or delete it.

Most of my time today was spent writing the code to make these buttons work as they should, and to trap errors, such as what happens if you try to delete a new (not-yet-entered) record? Or what if you try to move the top record up or to the top?

The rest of my time today was spent getting the “Set as Default” checkboxes to work, such that only one of them can be checked, and there must always be at least one.

The good news is that all of this code can be copied and reused on the other list forms, including Venues, Event Types, and Events, as well as on the forms that list the repertoire for the designated Default Event.

And this, my friends, is the first major “piece” of the Events Management feature of LIDA. Things are rolling now, but there’s still quite a way to go.

Fingers crossed we can get it all operational this week. If not, then next week for sure.

Please let me know your thoughts on this so far.