In my team, we have a rotating on-call schedule. I'd like a reminder to ping the person on-call weekly. Currently, the only solutions I have are to schedule a reminder for every person on the team with alternating lengths, or to just remind 'check the on-call schedule.'
Is there any way to set a variable in a reminder which pulls from a list?
I'm currently tracking who's on-call through PagerDuty, so if I can pull from there within a reminder, that'd be great. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be possible with PagerDuty's limited integration, which is centered on raising alerts and creating channels. There's a PagerDuty /pd oncall command, but it doesn't work without human input, even if the command is used as a reminder.
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Background
A workflow I have allows users to book meetings. The time/day of the meeting is stored in a table along with other details like the email address.
I send them an email reminder 30 minutes in advance.
Problem
In order to send them an email, a recurring event is set up once a week to go through the table and schedule the email to be sent on time - 30 minutes.
I've added the ability to reschedule the meeting. The problem that creates is that the emails are already scheduled, so users get the reminders at the original time, which is confusing.
What I want to do
I want to be able to send them the email at the rescheduled time, but there are technical limitations to the platform I use, which are:
I cannot set up cron/recurring more frequently than every day. This would probably be better than every week, but if someone rescheduled within the day, they would still get the wrong email.
I cannot remove scheduled events - so any recurring events-based workflow would still send the original email.
I know - this is pretty limiting, but am I even approaching this in the right way?
given your constraints, I'd probably go with 'resign'.
But in all seriousness, if you can't remove scheduled events (and I'm guessing you can't 'move' them because this is too advanced for your CTO to get their head around) then the only way I see it is to break the email send process into two steps - send scheduled event to PROXY in-front of your email sender, check if there is another event (i.e. can you add some 'cancelled/moved to data to the original one) and if so don't send it.
How do you send a [survey-link] that creates/links to a new instance of a repeating-instrument survey in REDCap?
ie imaging you have customers who should visit you on a regular basis. You have two instruments:
customer
visit [set as a Repeating Instrument + enabled as a Survey]
And you have an alert that regularly sends them a "Time for your next visit" email.
When I send an alert to a customer with [survey-link:visit] it will work the first time. The email will contain a unique URL for that customer's visit. But when the alert is sent a second time, person will open the URL and get a "Thank you for your interest, but you have already completed this survey."
I can manually (via the web admin) create a new instance of their Visit. But how should I do this automatically?
Thank you.
As of version 12.5 this is now supported using a smart variable [new-instance] which, when appended to a [survey-url] or [survey-link] smart variable, will target a new instance of the instrument if it is repeating. In the same release came ASI options around repeating instruments, which allow you to repeat an ASI every X minutes, hours or days, and each successive ASI instance points to the specific instance of the survey instrument. This is useful for daily surveys.
For your use case, [survey-link:visit][new-instance] will do what you want. Send it to them once and instruct them to fill it out as many times as needed, or send it however many times you need to.
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Yes, this is a current limitation. It has been requested of the REDCap developers to add a smart variable [new-instance] that can be appended to a [survey-link] or other smart variable to instantiate a new instance of a repeating instrument, and they have responded positively.
Maybe the most appropriate workflow here would be for you or the project staff to manually create the visit instance, save it with a date, and have an alert that sends them an invitation to complete the visit details, or whatever you need them to do.
If you want the respondents to instantiate the visit themselves (i.e., make a booking rather than respond to a booking made on their behalf), the only workaround I have personally managed is to enable the survey queue and activate the repeating instrument on the basis of some logic (say, [consent] = 1), and in the survey settings of the repeating instrument, enable the option to Allow respondents to repeat the survey.
With these settings, the survey queue will allow the survey respondent to create a new instance of the instrument themselves by clicking the 'Take this survey again' button (button text configurable in survey settings). They can be emailed their link to the survey queue via an alert using the smart variable [survey-queue-link] or [survey-queue-url].
For extra credit, you could get fancy with the survey queue logic so that the instrument is disabled if, say, the last instance of the survey has today's date, using something like [consent] = 1 and datediff([visit_date][last-instance],"today","d",true) > 0. With this you could prevent them smashing it and adding multiple new visits at once.
I am working on a project where the objective is to keep track of whether a client has uploaded data within their expected time-window or not. These windows can occur daily, weekly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, quarterly... etc. I'm currently using the CRON syntax to describe these schedules which kind-of works, but it falls short in some scenarios, for example the bi-weekly one.
I was wondering if there is some industry standard way to efficiently describe and store schedules that I don't know of. I tried to educate myself via Google, but when I put the word schedule into the mix, it always assumes I'm trying to schedule some task, but I only want to calculate dates based on these schedule definitions and compare the incoming file dates with them.
Thank you
Is there a way for me to make multiple all-day events at weird intervals. If so, is there a way to make it a template so I can do it faster?
I have a very repetitive business that has identical deadlines for every project I am given. Currently, I have to add all of these deadlines into my outlook calendar manually. I'd like a short cut where I can select a template or something that automatically programs the various all-day calendar items that I currently create manually.
For instance, I get a project today and I want to make an all-day reminder in 15 days to remind me to complete my first task. 7 days later, I need an all-day reminder for my second task. 45 days later, I need a reminder for my third task.
The other scenario is deadlines. I want to add an all-day event in my outlook calendar for the final deadline for a project. I'd like a 15 day reminder and a 5 day reminder to appear on my calendar as all-day events. I know there is a way to add a single reminder, but if it pops up while I'm away from my desk, I tend to ignore the reminder. An all-day calendar item is much harder to ignore.
Is there some way to automatically do this through a macro or function of MS Outlook of which I'm unaware. I keep my life in outlook, so I'd like for all of my deadlines to appear there as well.
TIA
I need an online application in which I share to a bunch of people (by their emails) a time period, with a certain granularity. Let's say one week from day X to day Y, with time slots of 1 hour and half, and asking people to fill them in order to book their slot (they should see slot availability). Is there a free web app that is capable of doing that?
I regularly use google calendar to invite/share with my colleagues for the meetings. It allows them to respond yes/no to my invitation. I also use it for scheduling my busy work slots so that it will remind me of at the right time. If you need to know more about setting up sharing appointment slots in Google calendar, you can refer at
https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/190998?hl=en
There are also other meeting scheduler apps that might suits well for your needs; please see the following.
Reference 1: https://zapier.com/blog/best-meeting-scheduler-apps/#timebridge
Reference 2: http://mashable.com/2012/09/20/shared-calendar-apps/#FOLZrYKZ.8qE