What are dynamic types?

Different types of objects have different types of attributes: Notebooks, rooms and vehicles all have their own characeristics; lectures have attributes different from meetings or conferences. You can easily customize Rapla for your domain by creating or modifying resource-, person- and event-types.

If you manage rooms, you can create a resource-type "room" and add attributes like "number of seets", "department" or "has blackboard".

Or if you manage courses create an eventtype "lecture" with the attributes "year" and "study course".

This types are called dynamic types, because you can create and change attributes on running Rapla-System.

Example: Creating a resource-type "room"

Click on the 'resources and persons' icon in the left menu, select 'resource-type' and click 'new resource-type' and enter "room" in the 'typename' text field. You should see the following screen:

Now, add a new attribute with the name "number of seats" and type "integer" and save to create the resource-type. To create new rooms, switch to the calendar, right-click in the list and choose "room" in the combobox in the upper left corner. You can now enter the "name" of the room and the "number of seats"

Adding a category-attribute to the resource-type "room"

We now want to assing the rooms to the departments they belong to. We do this by adding an attribute of type 'category'. But before that, we need to enter our department-categories in the [category-view|Categories]. Create a new category with the name "departments" and add three sub-categories "Department A", "Department B" and "Department C". You should see the following screen:

Save the categories and go back and edit the resource-type "room". Add a third attribute with the name "department" and the type 'category' and click on the 'root' button. Now you can select the category that should be used as the root for this attribute. The sub-categories of the selected root represent all valid values for the attribute.

Choose "departments" as root and save the modified resource-type. Try to add a new room, you should be able to select a department for the room.

Using attributes for filtering

The attributes of a dynamict type have mainly informational purpose but also can be used for filtering:

Show me only the rooms in department A on the first floor.

or

Show me the foundation lectures and courses of the department of computer-science.