Appointment to be started in user defined date and time

#1

Hey,

In our application, we would like to start an appointment after asking user to input date and time from the chat (setting date and time as the answer type and store the result in a variable). We would then like to start the appointment on this date at the input time. I think there should be some settings in the rule for EXECUTION on PERIODIC BASIS but cannot find and variable like $systemCurrentTime so cannot proceed… How should we config that to make that happen?

We have searched through the forum and found the two posts (Appointsment in 2 days) and (Send time-based notification to individual participants). It seems that those are the methods to send out the notification based on inputs of how many days later and what time but seems there is no direct way if we ask the user to input the time in date picker directly?

#2

Hi,

Sadly the datetime input from the user will not be sent as a raw timestamp. That is something we want to support since we are aware of how awkwardly time is handled in our software. What you will get is a date string of the form “29.08.2021,14.95” to denote e.g. 29th August 2021, 14:57.
For the server side, there are several variables. One is $systemTimestampInMilliseconds that you could use in conjunction with some JavaScript that executes in the PERIODIC RULE. See https://discourse-mobilecoach.ch/t/change-reminder-time-to-utc/101 on how that would work. I would suppose you convert the user provided string into a date object, which can then easily be compared to $systemTimestampInMilliseconds.

Let me know if you need more help. I might find some time in the near future to provide a full example

Cheers
Fabian

#3

Yes I saw the formatDateForServer function in the DateInput component in the client.
So maybe I can set a rule in the chat dialog for each of these time input received and then sent back the value to client so that the client can convert back the value into timestamp in ms so that it can be compared with $systemTimestampInMilliseconds in the PERIODIC RULE. Will check for the details in the link you posted and see if this works.

Thank you for your help.