Outlook will display different colors for the type of entry in its calendar. Custom categories are possible with colors. Notes does not have this. SO…
I’ve developed some custom categories for appointments in the calendar. The custom fields are similar to the Colors tab of Preferences. I added 20 custom categories and set of colors for each. I modified the $Cat field and the color column in $Calendar view. I see color changes in the designer view but no color changes occur in the calendar unless I change the “Appointment” color in Preferences. The view seems to ignore all hard coded or software changes to the color.
With the complexity of the mail DB, I could easily be missing something. IBM, are you listening? This is a biggie in competition with Outlook. Please give me some insight. If you want to look at my code, let me know. If anyone else has insight, please furnish. Thank you in advance.
This is most probably caused by the profile document in the mail file. Because a user has saved their colour preferences (most times completely unaware), the Notes client completely ignores the colour column in the calendar.
There is this comment in in the column formula: “this color column is used only if the user has not saved their mail preferences”, which would appear to be key in the reason for the behaviour.
What would be useful is if there was a way to circumvent the enforcement of this setting, allowing users to choose their own colour preferences on a per document basis.
That was the solution. I figured out what the view is doing with undocumented fields on the form. I reprogrammed the fields and added to the Preferences (profile doc) so I could add my own custom categories and have text and background colors apply. It works great. Took 40-60 hours though as I had to figure out what Notes was doing internally. This should be part of standard mail IBM…