28 September, 2022
This provides a function and a sub-function that converts weekly schedule data into a plot of overlapping time-boxes, in order to answer questions like “when does a group of people have availability?” or “Who is busy at a given time?”
It was initially conceived of in the context of higher ed student schedules, but could be used for group schedules in any other context, or room/resource schedules as well (although hopefully with fewer overlaps in those cases). Since the plotting is done by a function, this code can easily be used to generate multiple outputs for different groups or resources within an organization.
This is designed to work with a dataset, which has one row per scheduled event, and the below columns:
- ID: identifies the people/groups/entities to whom the schedules belong
- BEGIN_TIME: formatted as HHMM in military time
- END_TIME: formatted as HHMM in military time
- MONDAY_IND: equal to “M” if the event occurs on Mondays, else null
- TUESDAY_IND: equal to “T” if the event occurs on Tuesdays, else null (not saying this is the ideal format, but it’s the one I was given)
- WEDNESDAY: equal to “W” if the event occurs on Wednesdays, else null
- THURSDAY_IND: equal to “R” if the event occurs on Thursdays, else null
- FRIDAY_IND: equal to “F” if the event occurs on Fridays, else null (see above)
- SATURDAY_IND: equal to “S” if the event occurs on Saturday, else null
- SUNDAY_IND: equal to “U” if the event occurs on Sunday, else null
But it could just as easily be converted from any weekly schedule-type data that isn’t in a work management/email/meeting application already.
This will plot the schedules accurately whether someone enters a daily activity on 5/7 separate line items, or enters it on one line with each indicator populated.
Sub-function: DayPlotter is a sub function that takes timed events that would be on the same day (SliceDF) and creates a series of geom_rects (with position controlled by xcent). This output of this function will be unformatted, unflipped, etc. and have numeric time value.
Example:
ggplot() + Schedule %>% filter(MONDAY_IND == "M") %>% DayPlotter(.5)
Main function: SchedulePlotter takes a dataframe of the format specified at the top of this doc, creates daily plots using the sub-fucntion DayPlotter, and then combines / formats them into a weekly schedule.
Example:
Schedule %>% SchedulePlotter()
Please note the ability to color as needed by individual/group/etc. for added information OR to use a single color if that information is not relevant.