Schedule - end_times

[tshore]

In » Schedule Display Settings, I have selected "Show the start and end time for every event". So that seems fine, except that the schedule groups presentations together based only on the start time (I have selected "Schedule presentations by time and date individually"). I have attached a screenshot to show the problem. The first few presentations in the 8:30 - 8:45 block are 15 talks, no problem, but the presentations at the end are part of a symposium that runs from 8:30 - 10:00.

Picture 11.png (116.69 KiB) Viewed 1462 times

Originally, we decided not to use time blocks because the conference organizer wanted the actual time to appear with each talk (ie. instead of having all talks listed under TALK SESSION 1 8:30 - 10:00 with no times, he wanted the schedule to say which talks start at 8:30, 8:45, etc.). In retrospect, I probably should've had them setup blocks for each talk time (ie. TALK SESSION 1.1, 8:30 - 8:45), but it's too late now - they've already spent a day entering presentations.

So, I think that this is a bug, that is, having a presentation that runs from 8:30 - 10:00 labelled as running from 8:30 - 8:45.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

I've replicated this, and have filed a bug report: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5432. Please feel free to CC yourself for future updates.

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

Any suggestions as to how I can make this a bit nicer in the meantime?

http://www.csbbcs.org/2010/schedule

I might take a crack at fixing this myself, but I would need a suggestion to get started. It didn't exactly look like it would be a quick fix when I was poking around in the source code.

Also, in order to give this conference organizer what he wanted, I would need to be able to assign each talk to a time block and then, within that block, I would need to have the ability to assign each talk a start and end time. Do you think this is a reasonable feature request?

[tshore]

I'm really getting it from these guys. They are getting pretty worked up about their messed-up schedule. Do you have anything for me?

[asmecher]

Hi Trudy,

There's a patch posted at the Bugzilla entry.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[tshore]

Thank you very much. That seems to have fixed it.

Now, if only I could get the special events for a time period to appear at the top of the block instead of seemingly randomly in the middle of the presentations that share the same beginning and end times...

Also, to me, it made more sense to display the longer presentations/events before the shorter ones, so I changed the sort to descending for endTime:

http://2010.csbbcs.org/ocs/index.php/bbcs/2010/schedConf/schedule

It was simple to do in pages/schedConf/SchedConfHandler.inc.php

Code: Select all

-         uasort($itemsByTime[$startTime], create_function('$a, $b', 'return strtotime($a->getEndTime()) - strtotime($b->getEndTime());'));
+         uasort($itemsByTime[$startTime], create_function('$b, $a', 'return strtotime($a->getEndTime()) - strtotime($b->getEndTime());'));

[tshore]

I figured out how to get the special events to appear at the top of each block of time. I just needed to insert the the special events into the beginning of the array after it had been sorted, instead of before. The changes were made in pages/schedConf/SchedConfHandler.inc.php.

[tshore]

Just came up against this again in a current conference (unfortunately, had to use 2.3.3). I guess this is more of a feature request than a bug. If you take a look at the conference schedule:

https://shoreserv.mcmaster.ca/IMRF/ocs4/index.php/imrf/2012/schedConf/schedule

you see that we have organized the presentations into time blocks. It would be nice to be able to optionally assign a name to each time block (ie. Paper Session #1 or Symposium #2 - symposiumTopic). As a workaround, I've asked the conference organizer to add a special event with the same start and end times at the time block and whose title is the same as the title of the time block.