How do I create Timed Alerts

[dmurnane]

I look after various contracts where we have to visit sites various times a year. I have the next visit due date already in a date field. Is it possible to get either an automatic e-mail sent to my self to remind me of visits due with one weeks notice or a pop-up dialog box when I open the file?

 

[gmannatl]

If you only want it to alert you when you open the file you could create a startup script that could do this.

Go to File - File Options and you can specify the script to be run when the file is opened. The script would basically freeze the screen, go to the layout with the date field, and loop through the records and you could then go to a new layout that showed these records.

If you want this to trigger periodically while the file is open there are a number of plugins that could provide this functionality for just a small fee.

 

[dmurnane]

Thanks gmannatl for your reply, I know how to do a basic search script, but how do I constrain the date to 1 week from the due date?

 

[TStriker]

I winging this a bit here but it should be something like this:

Enter Find Mode [ ]
Set Field [ Table::Field; GetAsText ( Get ( CurrentDate ) & "..." & GetAsText ( Get ( CurrentDate ) ) + 7 ]
Perform Find [ ]

-Striker

 

[gmannatl]

TStrikers solution would work fine for this, but he has missed one closing parentheses. The correct format should be :

Go to Layout [YourLayout]
Enter Find Mode [ ]
Set Field [ Table:ateField; GetAsText ( Get ( CurrentDate ) ) & "..." & GetAsText ( Get ( CurrentDate ) + 7 ) ]
Perform Find [ ]
Enter Browse Mode []

This will find all the records for the next 7 days. If you want it to pop up a new window you could create another layout of the same data that is in list or table mode. Then just add a line like this to the beginning of the script:

New Window [Name: "Notifications";Height: 100; Width: 300]

This would just produce a small window with the records listed with just a limited amount of the data for just a simple easy reminder. Then as I mentioned you could bind this to the startup or simply move it to the top of the scripts so you could access it with the CTRL+1 shortcut.

As I mentioned there are plenty of 3rd party plugins created to "trigger" scripts to run at set intervals or when certain fields changed etc. Some of these are in the 20-40 dollar range.

 

[dmurnane]

That worked great, many thanks all.