Can I organize events in the backend by Event Date?

Hello,

I'm working on a project where we need to be able to see an event's date on the backend without having to click into each event. I was hoping to replace the Publication Date with the event date. Is this possible?

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi Jeffrey,

Cat you please clarify which date do you want displayed. By default int he List items template for Events you can choose the template Titles, cities, dates which will  show EventDate. If you wish to display the EventStart date, you can simply edit the template and add this field to it. Please inform me if you need further help setting this up, or if the functionality you demand differs from what I've proposed.

Hi Boyan,

When the event is published, I can see the date just fine—that's not a problem. What I'm wondering is if there is anyway to change what information is displayed for each even item on the Content/Events backend page. Currently I can see Title, Translations, Actions, Owner and Date. Instead of displaying the date published under date, however, I would prefer to display the event's Event Start value or add the Event Start to the list of information that I can see on the Content/Events backend page.

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for the clarification. Yes, the demanded functionality is possible. You can set the column names, content and add/remove columns form the EventsList Grid in the backend. Please refer to the attached screenshot for more information on where exactly to set the Date column to display EventStart instead of DateCreated. If you need any further assistance, please write back.

Regards,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

This solution worked, but it's not very intuitive.  Hopefully there are plans to improve the usability in the backend.
How do I also get it to sort by event start date?  I tried editing the EventsBackendList settings, but after saving the form, the events don't show up and I get the following error:

Property accessor 'ItemsPerPage' on object 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI.ContentUI.Views.Backend.Master.Config.MasterGridViewElement' threw the following exception:'Specified cast is not valid.

This is what the config file looks like, in case that helps:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<view xmlns:config="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration" xmlns:type="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration:type" config:version="4.2.1650.0" itemsPerPage="False" type:itemsPerPage="System.Boolean, mscorlib" viewName="EventsBackendList">
<viewModes>
<add Name="Grid">
<columns>
<add clientTemplate="&lt;span&gt; (EventStart) ? EventStart.sitefinityLocaleFormat('dd MMM, yyyy') : '-' &lt;/span&gt;" name="Date" />
</columns>
</add>
</viewModes>
</view>

Thanks,
Matt

EDIT: It was actually the first solution that caused the error, just didn't discover it until I tried to change the sort.  Every time I edit the Events grid column settings, my config file becomes invalid until I remove the following attributes from the view node:

itemsPerPage="False" type:itemsPerPage="System.Boolean, mscorlib"

Hello Jeffrey,

From events settings you can not specify the sorting order. You can turn off sorting by settings True to DisableSorting. To sort the events go to events module and in the right column(Manage events) you can sort them by date modified. Note the custom sorting you apply will not be persisted after the next postback.

Best wishes,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team

Stan,

As far as I can tell, you CAN set the sort expression in the Events settings.  I went to Events > Controls > EventsBackend > Views > EventsBackendList, and then set the Sort Expression to "EventStart DESC".  That seems to have worked just fine.  Your suggestion for disabling the sort and filtering by date modified doesn't help with sorting by the actual event date.  The users don't really care about data modified or date published.  The most important date is the event date, and I would like to see that as the default, but at least we were able to customize it.  I also wish the users could sort by clicking on the column headers, or filter by the event dates.  I have to assume that's in the plans, but just hasn't been implemented yet.

In any case, the real problem here is that I followed your instructions for adding the Event Start Date column, and it corrupted the config file (see error on previous post).  I could not get the events to work again until I manually removed the offending attributes from the config file.  I'm not too concerned since I figured out how to fix it, but I thought Telerik might want to be aware of the bug.

Matt

Hi Matt,

Can you please let us know which version of Sitefinity you are currently using, as the problematic behavior you have described might be due to a bug we used to have in our Sitefinity 4.2 official release. The problem was caused by configurations changes not saving properly. The bug has been fixed in the hotfix which we have released shortly after the Sitefinity 4.2 release. This hotfix also introduces the widely requested Firefox 6 support and fixes several security issues. I would kindly recommend you to upgrade a copy of your project to this hotfix, and let us know if any problems persist.

Kind regards,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

We're currently running the official release of 4.2.  Is the hotfix ready for production, or is this one of those developer only releases that won't have an upgrade path?  More than happy to try it, just wanted to know if it's a throw away test, or something that we can apply to production once we know it's stable...

Matt

Hi Matt,

The hotfix is officially supported. It just adds few .dll files that fix problems.

Best wishes,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team