New Plug-in in the Wild!

I’m happy to announce the first early adopters release of the SkillBuilders Schedule item plug-in. If you attended the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference, then you had two changes to see the plug-in demonstrated live: during the Sunday Symposium and then again in the Plug-in Showcase. Since then I’ve added custom time pickers and simplified jQuery UI skinning (now one small change in the items configuration settings provides an entirely different look and feel).

Click here to view/download the plug-in!

If you didn’t get to attend the conference here’s the introduction:

Event scheduling is a common task that developers repeatedly face when creating applications. The types of events can vary greatly as can their configuration options. Some events are simple, occurring only once while others are more complex and can repeat indefinitely.

Developers may choose to save time by supporting only the types of schedules that the requirements dictate. This often results in “one-off” configurations with custom logic that cannot be reused very easily. The SkillBuilders Schedule item plug-in was designed to greatly simplify and standardize event scheduling in APEX applications.

The SkillBuilders Schedule item plug-in supports single occurrence events as well as those that recur daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Its options can easily be customized via a declarative interface to meet specific requirements and its UI has been skinned using jQuery UI themes so customizing the look and feel to match your APEX theme is as simple as changing one word in the item’s configuration settings.

Anyone that has worked with events in the past is aware that it all comes down to dates. To that end, the SkillBuilders Schedule item plug-in comes with a PL/SQL package based API that can be used for various functionality – even getting the dates over which an event will occur.

Look out for more plug-ins coming soon!