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.
It was my expectation that if I remove a den from a calendar event, save, then re-add the den to the event and save again that this would “refresh” the invitees list to include any scouts that were newly added to the pack/den. Instead, the den’s members were indeed removed from the calendar event when the den was removed from the event, but when I re-added the den to the event, none of the den’s members were re-added to the event. Is this expected behavior?
Background on why I did this:
We had new scouts join our pack/den but all of the calendar events for our pack were already created. I figured the easiest way (without using the chrome/firefox extension) to do this would be to remove/re-add the den from the calendar event so it would add the new scouts and their family connections to the invitees list without me having to manually invite the new scouts and their parents. I know I needed to get them added to the event because scoutbook doesn’t automatically add them to existing calendar events.
SIDENOTE: I can see why changing den rosters wouldn’t affect the invitee/attendee lists to past events, but why not have them added to all future events? or is this an option and some box wasn’t checked when they were onboarded to the pack/den?
The ability to automatically add new unit/subunit members to events has been requested, but is in the backlog somewhere. BSA IT has neither committed to when, nor even if, it will be implemented, at least publicly.
That said, check out the Feature Assistant Extension for Chrome and Firefox. It’s a volunteer-written and -supported extension/add-on which provides many (but not all) of the “missing features” in Scoutbook by automating what would otherwise be fairly tedious manual tasks. Among these is adding new unit members to existing events.
Totally understand about the feature request for automatically adding new unit/subunit members to events. However, in the scenario I laid out, is this the expected behavior?
Just to lay it out step-by-step:
Remove Den from event by unchecking the den from the “calendar” field in the event.
I’m not 100% sure what the intended behavior is, not being on the development team. That said, simply adding an event to a unit or sub-unit calendar does not (always) automatically invite everyone to the event. I saw the same behavior you see (i.e. people from a subunit not already on the invitee list are not automatically added when it is added onto that subunit’s calendar) when I tried it out just now.
It’s been a while since I was in a pack, but I know in the troop, creating an event of type Troop Meeting automatically invites the scouts and direct contact leaders. However, editing the event does not auto-add anyone if I delete them from the list. I suspect, based on that behavior, that the subprocess which actually auto-adds the invitees only runs when the event is created. That might explain the behavior you’re observing.
Scoutbook only automatically sets invitees on an event when it is first created. Editing or adding a sub-unit to an existing event does not change the invite list. This must be done by manually editing the invite list.
