2.3.2. Viewing Lists of Scheduled Items

The calendar views described in the previous section are organized in standard calendar units of days, weeks, etc. The user may also view scheduled items in the alternate form of ordered lists. To view a list of scheduled items the user chooses the 'View Lists' menu command. In response, the system displays the submenu shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: View lists dialog.


The first four commands in the 'View Lists' submenu are the four types of scheduled item. The last command provides functionality to sort the lists in different useful orders.

Figure 12 shows the response to the users selection of the 'View Lists Appointments' command.

-- Here's a rough draft, with actual data to be filled in. --



Figure 12: Basic Appointments List.


The figure shows a chronologically ordered list of the appointments created by the user in the preceding scenarios. The format of the list items is precisely the same as in the daily and weekly lists displays. [Look at all of the options available for daily and week lists view and figure out which apply here.]

By default, the list is sorted chronologically by appointment date and time. The list contains all the appointments in the six-week period starting one week prior to today's date. The default ordering and time-range of the list can be changed using the filtering commands described in Section ??? of the requirements.

When the user selects the 'View Lists Sort' command, the system displays the dialog shown in Figure 13.

-- To appear. --

Figure 13: List Sorting Dialog.


The sorting dialog allows the user to specify the primary, secondary, and tertiary sorting keys for each of the four types of scheduled item. By default, the sorting keys for all four types of schedule item are as follows:

  1. start date/time is the primary key

  2. duration is the secondary key

  3. title is the tertiary key

The available sorting keys are derived from the information fields in each type of scheduled item. Figure 14 shows expanded sorting menus for each of the four types of scheduled item.

-- To appear. --

Figure 14: List sorting keys.


The precise sorting details for each of keys are as follows:

  1. Date/time sorting is in ascending chronological order of the starting date and time. Appointments and meetings have both a start date and a start time, the pair of which are used as the combined key. Tasks and events have only start date, which is used as the sorting key.

  2. Duration sorting is in ascending order from shortest to longest duration.

  3. Title sorting is based on the lexical order of title strings, where lexical ordering is defined as characterwise comparison based on the ASCII character collating sequence, ignoring differences in the case of letter characters (i.e., sorting is case insensitive).
The date/time key consists of both a date and time for appointments and meetings. For these

Lists of the other three types of scheduled items (meetings, tasks, and events) are very similar to appointment lists. Section ??? covers the scheduling as well as the listing formats for the three additional types of items.



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