Pling-o-matic - Case Studies

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Rachel Kettlewell at Derby City Council uses the Tribal system to manage her records on the Family Information Directory (FIDy).

She's planning on uploading information about single instances of activities to plings using the Pling-o-matic.

Here's the questions she asked us.

Q: One of the options that would appear to be necessary is identifying when an activity is limited to one day (due to the calendar option that is available on the Plings website) and it looks from the Wiki page that Plings would accept this data however in our system we have no option to specify a date for an event, we can time limit the record but that would presumably still show as a reoccurring event until Plings/FIDy ‘pulled’ it back. I was wondering if there was any way you could see to tag records that are one off?

Single Activities

There's a couple of ways of showing us activities that only happen on one day - like a summer festival perhaps.

1. Just put the date in the description and our condition called Boris will generate plings from those :-

This years summer youth festival is on Wednesday 12th of July between 10am and 5pm

2. (not sure if your vendor system supports this) Upload the StartDate and EndDate of the activity - so the XML for the above activity would look something like this

<Availability Refines='DC.Coverage'>
<StartDateTime>20010-07-12T00:00:00.0Z</StartDateTime>
<EndDateTime>2010-07-12T00:00:00.0Z</EndDateTime>
<Period Day='Wednesday'>
<StartTime>10:00:00.0Z</StartTime>
<EndTime>16:00:00.0Z</EndTime>
</Period>
</Availability>

I'd recommend you also set the fixed term of the record to expire once the event has happened so you don't have out of date info on FIDy.

Keeping your data up to date.

Q: I know we will have to arrange for our data to go live on the Plings website, however day-to-day once we’ve got everything up and running how will our data be transferred over to Plings?

Once you've given us the nod the pling-o-matic will create a complete fresh copy of your data in the wee small hours of the morning every day. This way if you add, delete or edit a record we'll reflect this at plings within 24 hours.