Schedules in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013
A schedule is a logical collection of appointments that contains the availability and assignments of a given resource. It is a logical collection of appointments with a scheduling interface. There is no schedule entity in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK. Instead, the service, resource specification, user, and equipment entities support the scheduling engine when booking appointments and service appointments. By using schedule messages, you can look for free or busy information, search for appointments, and book a specific appointment for a service and a set of resources.
Appointments stored in schedules are related to the owner of the schedule. It is only possible to ask the schedule for free or busy times within a given time period. The result of the operation is a collection of time blocks (appointments) that correspond to available or reserved time. You can create a schedule that represents the availability of a set of resources or even a set of activities or some arbitrary subset of service availability. To retrieve a schedule collection, use the retrieve messages listed in the following table.
The scheduling engine must know when changes are made to several different entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When changes are made, Microsoft Dynamics CRM automatically schedules an asynchronous system job to publish the changes. This occurs five minutes after the change, whether the change occurs through the user interface or through Web service methods.
Supported messages
The following messages can be used with the IOrganizationService.Execute method to query a schedule.
Message |
Description |
|---|---|
Retrieves the content (existing commitments) of the schedule for a given entity. Use this message to search the specified resources for an available time slot that matches the specified parameters. The message is available on all schedulable entities. |
|
Searches multiple resources for an available time slot that matches the specified parameters. |
|
Searches for available time slots and returns a set of available Appointment instances (as time blocks). The message is available on the Resource entity or the Service entity. |
See Also
Schedule and appointment entities
Sample: Seach for openings to schedule a resource
Appointment entities
Appointment entity messages and methods
Sample: Query the working hours of a user
Sample: Query the working hours of multiple users