GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 348400
Recurrence rule dialogue is ambiguous
Last modified: 2017-08-24 15:43:19 UTC
If I create a recurrence rule such as: appointment recurs every 1 week on mon, tue, wed, thur, fri for 4 occurrences it is not clear if it means: appointment recurs every 1 week on mon, tue, wed, thur, fri for 4 days or: appointment recurs every 1 week on mon, tue, wed, thur, fri for 4 weeks screenshot: http://librarian.launchpad.net/3517657/RecurrenceRule.png Instead of selecting number of occurences it would be better if you could select number of days|weeks|months Other information: related bug reports: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/53684 http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/show_bug.cgi?id=128
The external screenshot link (at least currently) is broken. Please attach screenshots and other relevant files to bugzilla, only. (See the "Create a new attachment" link below.) Anyway, just reproduced: The Preview in the Recurrence editor shows this, by displaying the day numbers in a bold font-weight. Occurrence equals Appoinment always. So we do have feedback that indicates this. However, I do agree that this is slightly confusing and ambiguous, at the very least with a timespan exceeding the 3 month preview. The visual feedback is too unobtrusive. Confirming.
Created attachment 69430 [details] Screenshot of recurrence rule dialogue
Agree with your comments, additionaly: * day numbers are only shown in bold during creation of rule, not when reviewing an existing rule [as in attached screenshot]. * If occurence = appointment always, maybe a good first step would be to replace the term occurences with appointments? I guess the difference is perspective - from a programmers perspective you creating multiple occurences of the same appointment. From a users perspective he/she is simply creating multiple appointments, the recurrence rule is just a tool to make it easier. To be fair to Evo, some of the confusion I experienced stems from the fact that my online calendar was showing events for 4 weeks and I assumed that Evo was not displaying recurring appointments correctly. I have since deduced that it is my calendar server at fault, not Evolution - see the ubuntu bug when launchpad.net is reachable again.
Thanks for a bug report. I'm closing this, because describing pretty complex rules on one line somehow always leads to fail. I agree that "N occurrences" is confusing in this case, but I do not think that "N appointments" would make it any better. It confuses me more, to be honest, but it can be that I'm just used to the "occurrence" word. As had been pointed out above, the preview panel is meant to make things clearer. You can enlarge the window, then more months are shown. The preview is intentionally "disabled" when an instance of a recurring event is opened. There is no way to open the master object again, once the component is saved; such thing would require asking on the editor open whether to open whole series, or to edit only the instance, instead of asking basically the same on save of the changes in the editor. I did think of removing this limitation in the not so distant past, but I finally decided not to change it. I thought that it would be confusing to show whole recurrence rule for a single instance in the editor, though I can be wrong. In any case, I would keep things as they are.