Calendar settings

Location: Administration > Appearance > Calendar

The days and events to lookahead settings are for displaying events in the Upcoming Events block. If the Upcoming Events block becomes too long you can reduce the number of days and events to lookahead.

Importing multiple events

Currently there is no way to import data to create multiple events. All events must be individually entered through the New Event button. Because the New Event data entry screen only allows drop down selection rather than typed entries, it is very difficult to design a macro for quick repeated input of New Events.

The only other option is to directly connect to the central moodle [SQL] database and directly enter data into the events table. Great care needs to be taken with this approach as alterations to the data structure may cause your moodle site to crash! To convert MS Excel dates to moodle Unix dates use: Unix date integer =((Excel date integer)-25569)*86400

List format

The calendar displays event lists one day at a time. There is no capacity to display a list of all site or course events over an extended period. To obtain date lists for publications, the only option is to link directly to the SQL database, select by the "courseid" and perform calculations to convert the UNIX "timestart" to a publishable date format:

Using a Microsoft Access query, collect data from the mdl_event table and create 2 calculated fields:

• calcdate: DateValue("1/1/1970")+[timestart]/60/60/24+10/24
• daysavdate: IIf([calcdate] Between #2/04/2006# And #29/10/2006#,[calcdate],[calcdate]+1/24)

Then, use additional calculated fields to separate the date, day of week and time (if needing to be formatted separately:

• Dte: Format([daysavdate],"mmm dd")
• DayName: Format([daysavdate],"ddd")
• Tme: Format([daysavdate],"hh:nn am/pm")

TIP: The dates for daylight saving need to be changed each year to match your location.

TIP: Very brief summary process for creating connection to moodle database in Windows environment: Install MySQL ODBC Driver 3.51 / Start settings control panel / admin tools/ Data Sources/ ODBC / add new service/ select MySQL ODBC driver/ follow prompts for User & password/ open access/ get external data/ point to MySQL ODBC connection

Navigating months

There is no easy way to jump to a specific month in the year other than to directly edit the URL variable for month "m=" : calendar/view.php?view=month&cal_d=1&cal_m=02&cal_y=2006

Display Current Day Events

Use link: http://moodle.org/calendar/view.php?view=day

See also

• Using Moodle URL to show today's calendar forum discussion