Dates on the Calendar
Any date field can draw itself on a calendar without creating an event — how that works, and when you still want a real event.
A calendar in Bluprint shows two different kinds of thing, and knowing which is which explains almost everything about how they behave.
- Calendar Events are records that own themselves — a shoot day, a team meeting, a deadline somebody typed straight onto the calendar. They hold attendees, recurrence, reminders, and a location.
- Projected dates are date fields drawn on the calendar. A Publish Date on an Idea, a Due Date on a Thumbnail project. There is no event behind them. The record is the date.
The second one is new, and it is why you rarely need to create an event at all any more.
Type a date, see it on the calendar
Fill in a date field on an Idea and it appears on that Channel's Content Calendar. You do not add it, link it, or sync it — it is already there, because the calendar is reading the field.
That has three consequences worth knowing up front:
- Rename the Idea and the block's title changes, immediately. It was always the same record.
- Drag the block to a new day and the field changes. There is only one date, so moving it on the calendar is editing the record.
- Clear the field and the block is gone. Nothing is left behind to tidy up.
Open a block to edit it
Click a projected block and you get a small editor: the record it came from, named at the top, and the one field it was drawn from — editable in place.
That is deliberately all of it. An Idea with thirty fields would make a popover nobody can use, so everything else is one click away: Open idea takes you to the record's own editor, where the rest of its fields live.
Choose what each calendar shows
Two controls decide whether a date field appears, and they answer different questions.
The field — for the whole workspace
In the Manage Fields window, a date field has a Show on calendars switch, plus two settings underneath:
Turning Show on calendars off hides that field's dates from everybody, on every calendar.
The view — for this calendar only
The Sources control in the calendar toolbar lists everything this calendar could draw — Calendar Events, plus every date field that projects — with a switch for each. On the Master Calendar the fields are grouped by Channel.
This is what makes a calendar a workflow rather than a firehose. A Master Calendar can show release dates from every Channel while leaving each Channel's internal review deadlines off. A Channel's Production view can show only its script due dates.
When you still want a real event
A projected date holds a date and nothing else. Sometimes that is not enough: this particular shoot day needs attendees, a meeting link, or a weekly recurrence.
Use Add more info to this date beside the date field. That creates a real Calendar Event bound to that field, and the split is strict:
- The field still owns the date. The event's start and end follow it, and are read-only on the event.
- The event owns everything else — attendees, reminders, recurrence, location.
- The date stops projecting. Once it has an event, that event is how it appears — so you never see the same date twice.
- Removing the event details keeps the date. It simply goes back to drawing itself.
Common mistakes
Looking for a date field that isn't on the calendar
Check both switches, in order: Show on calendars on the field (Manage Fields), then Sources on the calendar view. The second one is per view, so a date can be missing from one calendar and present on another.
Creating an event for a date that already has a field
If the date lives on a record, type it into the record's field and let it draw itself. Create a standalone event when the thing being scheduled is not a record's date — a meeting, a holiday, a block of studio time.
Expecting a projected block to hold attendees
It cannot — there is no event to hold them. Use Add more info to this date and the event that appears will.