[Dev] calendar data model

[Marcus Sundman]

Hi,

Why is an "appointment" the base for calendar entries? In my experience an 
appointment is almost always a part of something larger.

I might, for example, be attending a course. The course has a number of 
lectures and a final exam. These are appointments and have various 
attributes, such as time and location. However, the appointments are all part 
of the course which itself has a number of attributes, such as lecturer and 
web page address. Naturally these two concepts should be closely linked (at 
least in the UI); when looking at an appointment you often also want to look 
at the course details and when looking at the course you often want to have 
an overview of the "appointments" in the course.

Most appointments seem to be of this kind, even many one-time appointments. 
E.g., going to the dentist might be a one-time appointment (at least that's 
what I always hope for), but it is still only a part of the larger concept of 
"going to the dentist" where you also might want to have attributes that 
aren't directly related to the actual appointment. Let's say that the dentist 
decides that a second appointment is needed. Then you need to add a second 
appointment to the "going-to-the-dentist project". If those were just single 
appointments (i.e., completely unrelated), as they would be in most 
calendars, you'd have to copy almost all attributes (pretty much everything 
except date and time) from the first one into the second one.

So what I'm proposing is to have a "project" (or similar) concept that is very 
closely related to the "appointment" concept. Appointments could then be 
grouped into a project, which is an entity of its own. This way the 
appointment datatype could also be simplified, since much of what people 
normally cram into an appointment could (and should) instead be moved to the 
project that the appointment is part of.

Then you could also have project templates, such as "course", that define 
default attributes and appointment types.


- Marcus Sundman