Event groups

Variants handle a rota that varies from a normal week: Early on Mondays, Late on Tuesdays, a pattern you can state. Plenty of shift work has no normal week at all. You do Early, Late and Night in whatever order the rota lands in, which means there is nothing for the three of them to be variations of.

An event group is the answer. The group holds everything the shifts share — the name, the tag, the ward, the alerts — and never happens on its own. The shifts are the things that land on days, and which day each lands on is decided by painting a rota rather than by writing a rule.

Group or variants?

The test is whether you can say what usually happens. "Work, but Wednesdays start late" has a base schedule. "Six earlies, six lates and six nights, in an order that changes every month" does not.

Making one

Tap NEW. The Choose a Calendar Item step offers the four calendar items and, below them, an Event Group tile — Shifts or sessions with no standard week between them. Pick it, then choose a tag as usual.

The wizard is two steps:

1. What the shifts share. An ordinary event form with the repeat section removed, because a group happens on no day. Every field is optional: fill in only what is genuinely the same for every shift.
2. The shifts themselves. Name each one and give it its hours — Early 06:00, Late 14:00, Night 22:00.

Nothing is written until Finish. You are then dropped on the group's own page, which is where the rota lives.

Naming the shifts and rostering them are deliberately separate jobs: the names are set once, the rota is painted every time a new one comes out.

The group's page

The header reads EVENT GROUP, and under the group's name: Never happens on its own. Only the shifts do. That is the whole idea, stated where you cannot miss it.

Below that:

The hours block at the top shows the group's own start, end and length, with each field badged Set or Per shift. Per shift is not a gap: it is the group saying that this is one of the things the shifts answer for themselves, which is how a rota is supposed to work.

A group has no page on the calendar because it is drawn on no day. Tapping one of its shifts anywhere — month, week, day, the agenda rail, the events list — opens the group rather than the shift, since the shifts are the only thing on a calendar that can lead back to it. To open a shift as an event in its own right, tap it on the group's page.

Painting the rota

The rota is not a second place your schedule is stored. It is the shifts' rules, read together, which is what stops a rota and its shifts ever disagreeing.

On the group's page, pick a shift and tap the days it is on. Tap a day again to take it off. Painting writes as you tap — there is no Done on the card, because a change on the group's own page is finished the moment it is made.

See detailed view opens the ROTA screen, which answers a different question. The card says which days this shift is on; the full screen says which days it could be on, by drawing a month of your actual calendar under the shifts:

• Everything else you have that day appears as a pill, so you can see what you would be clashing with.
• A partner's event is outlined rather than filled. It is not yours to move.
• A day free of other plans is marked green — the one thing you are looking for when picking up an extra night. A day already carrying one of this group's shifts still counts as free.

Done keeps what you painted. Cancel puts every shift back exactly as it was when the screen opened.

Shifts that do follow a pattern

A shift's rule is a pattern plus painted days. If a shift has a pattern — Mon, WD, !BankHolidays, whatever the repeat sheet wrote — painting works around it rather than replacing it. Tapping one Monday off a shift that repeats Mon removes that Monday and leaves every other Monday alone; the rule keeps its pattern and records the exception, exactly as adding and removing individual dates does everywhere else.

A shift built entirely by painting has no pattern at all. It is nothing but dates, and that is a perfectly good shift.

Needs attention

The card appears only when a shift cannot be drawn as it stands, which is the one case nothing else on the page would show:

• "Late has no end time" — the group stated a length, the shift took it and gave only a start, and then the group's length was cleared. The edit that broke it was to the group and looked complete at the time.
• "Night is never rostered" — a shift with no days is simply absent from the rota, which looks exactly like a rota that is fine.

Each one takes you to the thing that fixes it.

Changing and deleting

Edit the group and every shift follows: rename it, move the ward, change the alerts, and the change reaches all of them. That is what the group is for.

Deleting offers two answers, because they mean different things:

Each shift is already a complete event, so keeping them is a real option rather than a consolation.

Next

• Inner and variant events: the other two ways one event can hold another
• Shift planning: the worked example, both ways round
• Editing and deleting: one occurrence versus the whole series