FAQ 303: Customising Appointment Captions in the Diary

[Support]

We sometimes get asked if it’s possible to fully customise “auto-description” captions for appointments in the diary – to which the answer is: YES!

Firstly, please follow these instructions :-
– Go to the diary and click the DIARY OPTIONS button (top right)
– Click the “Visual Settings” tab
– Notice there are 2 caption formats; one for “staff view” and one for “room view”…  these are the boxes you will be editing

There are six standard ‘merge fields’ available, as follows :-

{patient} = the name of the patient/contact attending the appointment
{type} = the appointment type (e.g. “Consultation”)
{status} = the status of the appointment (e.g. “Arrived”)
{clinic} = the name of the clinic where the appointment is booked (usful for multi-site clinics)
{staff} = the name of the practitioner involved in the appointment
{room} = the room that the appointment is booked in
{patcat} = the patient’s category
{patstatus} = the patient’s status

For sake of argument, let’s say we’re working in the STAFF VIEW. The default caption format is :-
{patient} [{type}] in {room}
This displays the patient’s name, then the type of appointment, then the room e.g.
Bloggs, Joe [Consultation] in Room 1
But what you if you want to add information from a different field? Please read on…

Constructing Custom Merge Field Codes
‘Merge field’ codes are all enclosed in curly braces i.e. {…} For custom merge field codes, THREE parts are required inside the braces :-
[1] The database table name
[2] The field which is displayed
[3] Mapping information for mapping the information to this appointment

Each of the above is separated by an exclamation mark character i.e. “!”.

For example, say we have added a custom field to our patient database called “my_text_field”. To add this field to the caption, we would need to add the following ‘merge field’ code to the caption format :-
{custom_patient_fields!my_text_field!per_id=@per_id}

Hence the final caption format would be something like :-
{patient} [{type}] in {room} - {custom_patient_fields!my_text_field!per_id=@per_id}
[1] The database table = “custom_patient_fields”
[2] The field name = “my_text_field”
[3] The “per_id” field in the “custom_patient_fields” table is mapped to @per_id which is the per_id of the appointment

This would result in :-
Bloggs, Joe [Consultation] in Room 1 - some custom info

 

 

A Note About Performance

Including additional custom fields in the auto-generated captions WILL affect performance because ClinicOffice will have to perform an additional database lookup for every appointment that is displayed in the diary.

If you’re non-technical, then this is obviously going to be quite difficult to follow so please feel free to post a reply with more information about what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll be happy to help!

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