Updating a Shared Bookmark

Overview

DayBack's shared schedules are kept in sync in three ways: automatic updates, manual updates, and via the Update Shares API.

Automatic Updating

If you're editing events inside the DayBack Calendar interface, then any changes you make to your existing events are synced to shares in real-time. This happens in the background without any additional action on your part.

Naturally, we think you should be making all your substantive changes in the DayBack interface, as that's where you can see your schedule in context, see when resources may be over-scheduled, and work at longer time scales so deadlines don't sneak up on you.

Yet sometimes edits are made outside the DayBack interface, such as in your other Salesforce pages or in Basecamp. Maybe you've added new resources, or new events are added that apply to the filters of the share, and in those cases, you can rely on manual updating.

Manual Updating

Manual updating lets you catch up on edits that may have been made outside the DayBack interface. Select "Share" from the Day, Week, Month tabs at the top right of DayBack's screen and then select "Manage Shares'. Click on the share you're interested in and then click "Update".

Updating will move the shared events into focus, switching your date and view to that of the share and applying any filters you included in your share. It will then refresh the share's content to match your view, including any edits you've made, new events you've created, or events that were deleted.

Other Options...

Using the Update Shares API

DayBack has recently developed an API for updating shares. This would take the place of manual updates. The API could be called from triggers in Salesforce or from server-side scripts in FileMaker so that whenever an event was changed, the public version of that event was updated automatically. The API is available to customers on the Plus plan for an additional yearly fee. It currently requires SeedCode developers to deploy (there is no public documentation yet) as part of an implementation package. If this kind of automation is of interest to you, please get in touch.

Using Salesforce Connect

We designed bookmarks for situations where the schedule isn't changing very often, or when you only have one bookmark to update, instead of one per technician.

For cases where the schedule is often changing, and you have lots of technicians who only want to see their own events, we'd recommend using DayBack's Salesforce Connect. This lets your technicians see a live view of their schedule that is always up to date: no bookmarks are required. You could even allow them to make changes to some of the fields on an appointment: like entering notes, or changing the status when they're done. They don't need a Salesforce license to do this, but they would need a DayBack license.

You can find a feature comparison between Salesforce Connect and bookmarks here: Calendar Sharing in Salesforce.

Limitations and Edge Cases

There are a couple of places where the behavior of updating a share might not be obvious...

Automatic updates only sync events that were originally included in the share. Events created after you've shared are only sent to the share when you manually update.

When you edit an event, DayBack waits until it's retrieved your edited event back from your original source (back from Salesforce or FileMaker, for example) before syncing your changes to the share. This ensures that any change made after you save are reflected both in DayBack and in your share--so changes made by things like triggers or formulas, which could alter an event after you edit it, are always included.

Deletes work great: delete an event in DayBack and it is deleted from the share. Deletes made on the DayBack interface are synced automatically; deletes made outside DayBack are synched when the share is manually updated.

This is a pretty edge case, but if manual updates are done by a user with different privileges (different profile or permissions) than the user who originally created the share, it is the updater's view that is shared in the update. This could include more or fewer events than were visible to the original share author. (Note that administrators can limit who can share events, restricting it to administrators, or turning sharing off altogether.)

If the same event is included in multiple shares, any edits made to the event will be applied across all shares in both manual and automatic updating. But if you delete the event, this is only carried across all shares in automatic updating. Manual updates will remove the event only from the share being updated, not from all shares.

If you edit an event so that it no longer matches the filter criteria of a share, the event is still shared, but will just not show up on the recipient's default share view where the filters are in place. When you manually update the share then the item will be unshared since it no longer matches the share's filter criteria.

Checking In on a Share

If you want to double-check than an edit has been synced to your share, you can click on a share at any time from Share / Manage Shares to view that share as the recipient would see it.