Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
When or Where is the ability to import calendar events from a spreadsheet.
We use this often in our planning as we plan months ahead of time and prefer to import from a data set instead of manual entry of each calendar. Ability to import from excel makes the management of the process more efficient and faster. We are all volunteers with limited time and this is a must.
I would also like to see the import as full CRUD process availably instead of just import, allowing update delete create to be completed in one step.
This seems like it would require some way to identify “existing” events versus “new” events in the upload file, since details that might permit reliable verification (e.g. start/end dates & times, event name) could be one of the things being changed.
I suppose that the event ID could be used to denote existing events (and a blank field to identify a new event), but it seems like a calendar “download” of some sort would be needed to easily capture that information (barring manual extraction of the event ID or some sort of parsing of the ical file to extract the event ID).
You would also need a flag of some sort to indicate event deletion vs data changes for existing events.
@CharleyHamilton You are 100% correct. Use an eventId to identify the event. new records without an event id are assumed to be creation, a flag to delete. Standard export, update, import functionality as used on a plethora of web/desktop tools world wide.
@edavignon - I assume from that comment that the calendar will remain for some time in Scoutbook in an editable format. I do not like the confusion that having multiple apps for small siloed or disconnected purposes creates in the parent (and leader) groups, it really drives them away from use of Scoutbook creating a heavy burdon on the pack leadership to dispense information in a consumable manner. I already have complaints and confusion because we have 3 or 4 portals we use today.
I absolutely understand migration to newer better subsystems for the undying management of the code base enhancing efficient development in modern day languages. But the UX of the system should aways remain a top priority.
I do like systems that support this. Export the calendar, make all of the edits after annual planning, then import back. In the past, it didn’t like having duplicates.
