With 5.18 we are happy to announce that we are bringing virtual scrolling into the timeline view of the event calendar along with multiple event selection and bulk operations.

Virtual scrolling

With the first steps laid down in 5.17, we are launching full virtualization that goes both horizontally and vertically, which means your views can now easily handle many-many resources over long periods of time.

Why is this important? The timeline is getting a really good adoption rate among customers, which has brought up use-cases that needed to handle bigger and more complex views. Besides being able to handle those situations we are also laying a foundation for new advanced features that will come to the calendar.

Play around with this example of a one year view, 200 resources and 10K events on both mobile and desktop (yes, it’s quick and snappy on mobile as well) and see it for yourself.

Multiple event selection

It was possible to click & select events in the calendar view, scheduler and timeline. Although clicking on events was working from the beginning, the agenda didn’t have event selection.

Besides adding event selection to the agenda, we’ve also added multiple selection to all event calendar views. If multiple selection is turned on, events can be selected with SHIFT/CMD/CTRL + click. You can also programmatically select events, which makes things like “select all” buttons, or filter & select possible.

Take a look at this multiple select example for the event calendar, or see how it looks in the scheduler, timeline and agenda. (Hint: select multiple events and right click with your mouse 😉

Event bulk operations

With multiple event selection supported it is possible to implement custom actions to help users perform their tasks faster. Wether it is update, copy, cut, paste or delete, all within a single calendar or between multiple calendars, we provide the tools so that you can build these features in your application.

We have built full examples for multiple selection with bulk updates and delete and cut, copy, paste between two event calendars  that you can check out, use for inspiration and build on top of.

New recurring  features

We have added new features to our recurring rule processor that enables the entry of more complex rules and simplifies things in some cases. When working with monthly repeats it is possible to specify multiple daily occurrences with a single rule instead of adding separate recurring events for each. 

The same is applicable to yearly repeats where you can add multiple days/months to the rule. The monthly repeating rules support every n-th day while yearly supports n-th weekdays of repeating months.

You can test all this out in the recurring rule editor and we’ve made our CRUD demo with recurring event support aware of these new features as well.

This applies to recurring events, colors, invalids and marked days in case of the event calendar. The date picker is getting the new capabilities for the color, invalid, label and marked day options.

Improved accessibility

This is an important topic and not just because of compliance, but also because there are more than 1 billion people living with disabilities today. 

We did an accessibility audit on our event calendar and date picker components and are shipping a number of improvements. This covers general improvements, cleanup and new labels that will help users with screen readers to navigate and interact with the event calendar views and date pickers more easily. It was a much needed step to make our products more inclusive.

We have segmented our accessibility documentation based on components. Browse the accessibility section of the event calendar or the date & time pickers.

What’s next?

We are pretty excited about what’s coming. We are working on some new features, like event sequencing and dependencies, improving the UX in a couple of places and working on better keyboard support for some of the event calendar views.