Upcoming Appointment changes

Dear Partners,

This post is meant to inform you about some upcoming changes to our software that will greatly enhance your experience with appointment management. These updates, which involve new appointment fields, have been designed with backward compatibility in mind to ensure minimal impact on third-party integrations and existing functionalities.

Here is a summary of the key changes:

1. Appointment Description Field Update: The existing “Description” field will be divided into two separate fields: “Title” and “Agenda”. Additionally, a third new field, “Internal Notes”, will be introduced. This division is part of our effort to make the appointment management process more organized and efficient.

2. Text Table Field Changes:

   • The text field length will be increased from 2047 to 4000 characters.
   • A new html_text field will be introduced that will contain rich/HTML formatted text with unlimited length.

3. Appointment Table Field Changes:

   • New fields agenda_text_id and internal_notes_text_id will be introduced as foreign keys (FK) for text-rows containing Agenda and Internal Notes values, respectively. The existing text_id field will be repurposed as the FK for the text-row containing the new “Title” value.

4. API (Service Layer) Changes:

   • The Appointment carrier and the AppointmentEntity carrier will receive three new fields: “Title” (plain text), “Agenda” (HTML), and “InternalNotes” (HTML).
   • The “Description” field will continue to exist for backward compatibility but will be a concatenation of the “Title” and “Agenda” fields. Note that if “Title” or “Agenda” has values during a Save-operation, any value sent in the “Description” will be silently discarded. If “Description” is sent in, but no “Title” or “Agenda”, the “Description” text will be split into “Title” and “Agenda”.

5. Appointment Archive Provider, Find Provider, and Quick Search:

   • These will provide the new fields (“title”, “agenda”, “internalNotes”) and the old “description” field, which will be a plain text combination of “title” and “agenda”. When the old “description” column is used as a restriction, a restriction handler should search the “title”, “agenda”, and “internal notes”.

We believe these changes will streamline the appointment management process and improve overall user experience.

The expected release for these changes are currently scheduled for v10.2.9, likely releasing at the end of Q3 or beginning of Q4.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further clarification on these changes.

Best Regards