absence 2.0

absence is a calendar tool written in Perl for keeping track of people (but could be adapted for any other object) on a daily basis.

It is meant to replace that ubiquitous whiteboard in the office of the boss.

You know the one, where someone has used a permanent magic marker to mark a matrix, and vacations/training/etc. are marked with non-permanent markers as blocks.

absence is a CGI system, and has a resolution of one day.

It is not intended to be used for keeping appointments or any other activity that requires a finer resolution.

It generates an image for each month to be displayed using the GD library, and it can be configured to produce PNG or GIF (or even JPEG).

Product's homepage

Requirements:

· Perl
· Module 'GD'

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

base on relational database:
· In versions previous to V2, various flat-files were used to store data (people/groups/types/holidays). As of V2, a relational database, PostgreSQL, now stores all data.

Reservation-Types configurable in management page:
· Previous to V2, reservation-types were configured by editing a file. In V2, they can be managed using the web interface.

multiple reservations per day per person:
· Before V2 it was only possible to make a single reservation for a person for a particular day. In V2 it is possible to configure Absence to allow multiple reservations per person per day. This means person-rows must have more vertical space ("height") to allow more than one reservation to be displayed. The height can be fixed or variable. If variable, a minimum and maximum can be specified. See the multiple-reservation demo below.

Image Maps:
· Absence can be configured to use one of two modes to handle absence manipulations, server-side or client-side image maps.

server-side image maps:
· This is not well-tested in V2.0. I recommend using client-side image maps.
· The month-image is a link; operations on people in the group are performed by clicking on the image. The coordinates are used to determine the nature of the requested operation. Server-side image maps are simple and allow small web pages to be generated, however you must click on holidays and absences to get more information on them.

client-side image maps:
· The month-image is simply an image in conjunction with client-side image map which defines all possible areas where a click is meaningful. The advantage to client-side image maps is that tool-tips are used. The web pages generated using this method can be BIG.