We do shifts for staffing community slash days, sign-up slots for annual mask fit testing and arduous pack tests, and more. (We use D4H events for this, rather than try to teach our membership yet another tool.) When creating events (or exercises) in D4H one can create the activity, but “clone it” to multiple dates / times. The title, location, pre-plan and attendance requests are all copied to the multiple activities created.
Note: Once created you can not longer edit them as one, so ensure your activity is correct before you press “finished” and save/copy it.
Once created the event or exercises typically have incrementing sequence numbers, and you can share them (say in an email) with your members by listing the links. We tend to do this in chronological order, allowing them to connect to D4H and sign-up.
Typically we have a limit on the number who can attending. Sometimes it is one member, sometimes it is based upon the number of a resource (e.g. available pack test weight vests.) We list the number that can sign up in the pre-plan, however we do have to manually monitor this since D4H does not support such a limit.
Longstanding bug/workaround…
D4H creates activity records, and multiple “attendance” records for the activity. (One or more per user.) Unfortunately when creating entries across multiple days the activity start & end date/time are correctly calculated, however the attendance start & end date/time are NOT. Somehow (seemingly a code bug) they inherit the *time* of the original activity.
If you create entries for 0900, 1000, 1100 you’ll get activities at those times, but attendance records at 0900, 0900, 0900. This is confusing to membership ‘cos it is presented incorrectly in calendar and the “Are you attending” prompts.
The way we’ve fixed this (since multiple reports over the years to D4H have not gotten this resolved, yet) is to:
- Use a date range in the events view to gather a list of all these events.
- Open each event in a separate browser tab (creating a “work list”)
- Press “Update details” on an event.
- Go to “Attendance” tab, select all attendees using top/left checkbox, use “Bulk Action” to “Set Period” (set to the correct activity dates) to correct the attendance records, then “Finished” to save.
- Close the tab once the event view is restored as corrected, taking one off the “work list”.
This bug/workaround does diminish the time saving benefit (for the administrator) of “Add Another Date”, but it still saves creating repetitive activities by hand.
Neukadye 