Required Objects and Properties

A number of objects and properties are required to get CtrlTime to work. If you have existing time, week and employee objects then feel free to keep using those for CtrlTime. However, please see the note below each section for compatibility related things to consider.

Employee Object

Syntax	Description
An Employee object	In order to track the time registration entries, an Employee object is required.
User property	An employee object must refer to an exact user through a lookup property pointing to a user account.

The Employee object is fairly commonplace in most M-Files installations, and hence, should be straight forward to configure in CtrlTime. Please do ensure that there is only one Employee object pointing to a given user via the User property.

Time Object

Here we can create object classes that we want to keep track of. In our example we divided the time registrations between Internal Time and Customer Time.

Syntax	Description	Data Type
Name or Title	This is the name of the time registration event. Feel free to change this to a custom concatenated property.	Text
Customer / Internal Project	This property is facilitated by a Lookup or Multi-select Lookup property pointing to a Project.	Choose from list “Projects”
Description	Contains additional description of the item	Text(multi-line)
Work Type	This property will allow us to create plots with the information about time spent on different activities	Choose from list “Work types”
Employee	The Calendar requires the event to be assigned to the current M-Files user.	Choose from list “Employee”
Start Time	A property definition for a datetime property that determines when this event starts.	Timestamp
End Time (Optional)	A property definition for a datetime property that determines when this event ends.	Timestamp
Hours	A number property used to count up how many hours this event takes up. This is used for e.g. reporting purposes.	Number(real)
Week (Auto)	This is the week number of the year in which the event occurs.	Choose from list “Weeks”

The time object is the bread and butter of any time registration system, and of course if you already have time objects today, they should be brought into the new system. Do pay attention to the datatypes that are in use. We use Timestamps for start and end times.

Furthermore, we also utilize Week objects to bind Time objects within the same week together. Hence, if you do not already have week objects following the same setup as CtrlTime, you also need to consider this for your migration.

Week Object

Weeks group the time objects for each employee into weeks automatically. If a time object is moved from one week to another in a calendar, the correct week is either selected or created. When a week is moved from Draft to Admin, all associated time objects are automatically moved to the appropriate state.

Syntax	Description	Data Type
Name or Title	This is the name of the week. Feel free to change this to a custom concatenated property.	Text
Year	This property indicates what year the event takes place.	Number(integer)
Week #	Represents the week number.	Number(integer)
Employee	Assigns the events to the current M-Files user.	Choose from list “Employees”
Start Time	A property definition for a datetime property that determines when this week starts.	Timestamp
End Time	A property definition for a datetime property that determines when this week ends.	Timestamp