The Diary in DFS is intended for the scheduling of forms to be completed by your kitchen staff. In this guide we will cover all of the options for scheduling one of your pre-existing forms.
This is a detailed outline of the Diary area. For a quick and intuitive outline and set up of your diary, you can watch our video tutorials here - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMCBnR8734fTgExnuygIXrL_fhGq95VNV&si=WQ8J9XNN0flWl4Xt
Diary Manager
This is where you create and amend form related events in your diary.
You need to be logged in as a Site Manager to do this.
From your the menu, go to Diary > Manager
Creating a diary event
To create an event, simply click on the day you require in the calendar:
You will then be presented with the following settings window:
Diary event settings (basic)
1. First you need to give the form a name:
2. Then select the staff you would like to be completing the form:
3. Next, select the type of form you are needing to schedule. This is established when the form template is first created under Forms Templates, covered in the following guide...
4. Then in the Forms dropdown you will be presented with all the forms under this category. Please select any for the purposes of this guide.
Event scheduling and timing
You are presented with the following options in respect to the timing and repeats of your event:
The “From” and “To” dates determine the length of time the event remains open, for a single instance of this event. It remains open for 24 hours a day based on the “All Day” checkbox you will see enabled by default.
The default settings you see here mean this diary event will only show for 24 hours (All day) on the day you selected.
Event timing
"All day" being selected means you cannot select a specific time of day, only that it remains open 24 hours for the given "From" and "To" dates selected.
If you unselect “All day” you will be presented with time fields:
By default as you can see this is set for one hour, 10am to 11am. These settings now mean the form will show once on 13th June for one hour, starting at 10am.
If you now select the “Repeating” checkbox we will be given further options to allow the event to display over a specific repeating period.
As above, you can see the Repeating tab is now visible with the following options:
Repeat
Select the specific calendar date the event is to repeat on.
E.g. “Daily” will repeat every single day, “First day of the month” will repeat on the 1st of every month
By every
Select the number of repeats.
E.g. If we selected “Repeat: Daily” above, this means that if we select “By every: 1” it will repeat the event every single day. “By every: 3” would therefore repeat every 3 days.
Similarly, if we selected “Repeat: Monthly”, the event will repeat once a month if we select “By every: 1”.
Repeat at
This is an option to select the specific week days, only visible when we select the “Repeat: Daily” option.
The below setting means this event will show every day, but only on the days we have selected. Important: when selecting specific week days, only use the “By every: 1” option as other number options break the logic for this scenario.
End
This is the option to specify exactly when the repeated events will end.
Click Create
You will now see the event in the diary as our settings have outlined above.
If you go to your dashboard, you will see the events prompted and ready for completion in a table:
Diary Preview
From your dashboard, in the menu go to Diary > Preview
The Diary Preview shows us the events we have diarised in the Manager section as outlined above and their completion statuses:
Filtering your diary preview
At the top of the diary preview page you are given a few options for filtering the visible events.
Event type
These options are related to the type of forms the event is linked to, which are created and managed under the Forms Templates module, covered in this guide…..
Status filtering
These options are outlined in the next section, related to the completion statuses of the events.
Diary event statuses
In this example we can see a single event scheduled every week day on 1st July. It’s status, as indicated by the clock icon, shows that it has been planned in advance in the diary manager but not been started yet:
Event status icons
Scheduled:
Started/Outstanding:
Completed:
Not completed/Missed:
Expired:
Colours are not an indication of status, these are only selected for visual reasons when the diary event is created in the Manager under the Details tab. See Diary Manager section in this guide.
Form records
In the menu, your forms records will appear in the relevant Forms Storage areas once actioned (or not), under the following categories:
