Datasets: Union-All functionality?

Developer Experience
1

I’m planning on making a Schedule-type view of events sourced from a dataset. For simplicity’s sake I only want to enter in the times that events are happening.

However, because of the way datasets work, gaps in the schedule would mean that the number of rows returned isn’t necessarily constant, which isn’t a bad thing except I would like the resultant view to always be consistent in the display.

I believe I can overcome this by simply adding a single dataset view for each item, and stack them in the layout as a sort of manual grid, but that would require a lot more footwork than just keeping it into one.

Essentially, I’m replicating a transposed version of this:

Where the black title row becomes column 1 values, column 2 is the text for the “currently going on” event, and column 3 is the “coming up next” event.

I could definitely do this with a raw SQL query, but alas I don’t think this is possible.

Anyone have any thoughts? If things go the way I think they will, I’ll end up creating over 20 dataset views for this, something I’d like to avoid.

2

It sounds like you’d like to cross tab a dataset with each “period” with another containing the events?

I think you’d be looking at writing a custom module to do this - to query the dataset directly (they are realised tables in 1.8). I don’t know if that sounds like something you’d be happy to undertake - but I think it would be fairly simple to do.

Module docs here: http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/advanced_modules.html

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3

Maybe for next year, this kinda dropped last-minute on me.

I have seen a few dataset-related questions that have been schedule related, so perhaps this could be useful to others.

I’ll see about it when things cool down. :slight_smile:

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