What is Event Field Override?

Whenever an event or to do list item is displayed it is hot linked to the Event Review screen where all non-empty fields are displayed based on the customization values found in the Event Customization file.

Event Override Strings are applied to an event's field after all other calculations are completed but before it is displayed. The override does exactly as its name implies - it overrides any calculated or stored value for the field.

For example, if you were to specify an override string for the subject field with a value of:

    This is the subject field

then in the Event Review screen the subject of every event would be:

    This is the subject field

regardless of its actual value.

The override fields are specified in the Event Customization File under the

    [OVERRIDES]

section.

Of What Use are Overrides?

The above example does not show the power of Overrides. So what are they for?

Another example:

Say that every event in the calendar represents a meeting and that for each meeting there is a series of meeting minutes, presentation slides, or other documents.

How would one use this program as a front end to tracking these meeting notes?

The simple way would be to use the URL field to associate each event to a web page that lists all the meeting notes - this would be fine except that you would have to 'invent' some method for associating the event with the web page - you could come up with some sort scheme whereby the end user would have to enter the proper URL - something like:

http://long_name_with _identifying_data_time_and_date.htm

But that is obviously open to a maintenance nightmare.

Overrides strings solve this problem by providing a read only (i.e. the end user cannot change it) string in each event that points to the proper webpage.

Continuing the example:

If you were to specify that the User Text 2 field were to be overridden with the following customization in the eventedit.dat file:

    [OVERRIDES]
    usertext2=<a href=/some.cgi?eventid=[EVENTID]>Meeting Documents</a>

Then whenever any event is displayed in the Event Review screen it would contain a link to the Meeting Documents that would call a CGI script (that you've written) that would pull the meeting documents out of some database of your own design. The key field of that database would be the event ID. This would provide an automatic linkage between this program and your external process keyed on Event ID.

Which Fields are Overrideable?

For a list of overrideable fields please see this help page.