SMS customer appointment reminder app

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Polar

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May 11, 2013, 4:09:27 PM5/11/13
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Hi,

Right now I use a SMS customer appointment reminder app to remind my customers of their upcoming scheduled appointment. The app scans my calender, and if it finds contact name= calender event, then it sends a SMS "Hi <name>, don't forget your appointment on <weekday, date> at <time>." The app has a config file where you tell it how many days in advance it needs to send the reminder. It marks the appointment as "reminded" when a SMS is send to the contact.

All works well, but there is one short coming, and I was hoping Tasker could do better ;o) ...

I would like to send an appointment confirmation when I enter the appointment. So I would need to have a kind of crontab to do f.ex an hourly check for new appointments. Next a reminder would need to be send one day prior to the scheduled appointment.

I think the challenge would be to build a database of all reminders send, something that is not included in Tasker (I assume ??).

Please your thoughts?

Christopher Maisch

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May 11, 2013, 4:22:47 PM5/11/13
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Based on your previous posts about pretty much the same thing, why don't you wait until someone finds the time to help. This group is about a dialogue rather than just being there for "support". Ask and wait for a response!

Polar

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May 13, 2013, 1:01:03 PM5/13/13
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@Christopher Maisch: Please forgive me my ignorance. This is a new arena for me. Not knowing where to start. Of course there is the manual, but it is the same as entering the mystical jungle full of secrets and culprits. So it's nice to through a stick or two before you enter, and see what comes back :o). And by the way, this is from the Tasker web site : Take the tour to find out more! Questions ? Try the forum.. Just following the guidelines ;o).


On Saturday, May 11, 2013 6:22:47 PM UTC+2, Christopher Maisch wrote:
Based on your previous posts about pretty much the same thing, why don't you wait until someone finds the time to help. This group is about a dialogue rather than just being there for "support". Ask and wait for a response!

@to all you Taskers out there. The following question is more about "is Tasker the tool to complete this mission, or should I learn to program with Android SDK?". Tasker is capable of much, that I've seen :o). I did some reading on several topics and just can not conclude if Tasker is the tool I need for this. So let me explain what my idea is. So those of you who are seasoned Taskers can advice me on what to do.

Basically I am looking at an appointment registration/confirmation app. There are many of those out there. Enter an appointment and send a reminder to the client at a specific time before the event. But I want to include the option to receive SMS where the client can book an appointment by SMS in f.ex.the simplest format <FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME>. The app will then allocate the first available time slot (predefined time slots in a db), reserve it and send an SMS back to confirm date and time of the appointment. I could think of more ways to format the SMS with additional parameters <TODAY, TOMORROW, DAY AFTER TOMORROW, dd/mm/yy, BETWEEN HH:MM and HH:MM,...>. The app can then look at the request, allocate the first available time slot that corresponds to the request, reserve it, and send SMS confirmation.

A second reminder should be send <-n hrs> before the event. Cancellation of an appointment could be done be returning the confirmation SMS, so the app can flag the time slot as available again.

The booked appointments should become visible in my Android calendar app. It should also be available for export to other web based EMR systems. I am investigating export/syncing possibilities to OpenEMR.

The UI and messages need to be configurable, and best would be to open up for multiple language so that users all over the world can modify it to suite their needs. This would run as an app, so I do not (yet) fully understand if Tasker can create an app that includes a database, like Android SDK does.

All ideas and opinions are welcome. 

Best regards, Polar

Matt R

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May 13, 2013, 11:28:58 PM5/13/13
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Doing the calendar entries and sending reminders should be possible and somewhat straightforward with Tasker. Doing the database stuff would be the tricky part, I would think. Depending on what/how exactly you're implementing, you could maybe use an sql database that you interface with sqlite3 shell commands.

Matt

Mike L

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May 14, 2013, 12:02:05 AM5/14/13
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I am attempting something similar to this. My purposes will be to send reminders to myself of clients I have not contacted in a certain amount of time (2 weeks or so). Coupled with location based tracking of where clients are located (to alert me if I am in the area and have not contacted them in 1 week or so). Entry of clients into a database will be needed for this.
From what I've read, all of this is possible with Tasker. I have a few other things I am working on but I will post progress in here if I think it's relevant. Hope you get things figured out, would like to see what you come up with. I am coming from no programming/coding experience so will not be speedy on my end haha. 

Polar

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May 14, 2013, 9:37:13 PM5/14/13
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Same here. Not a specialist, nononooooo ;o). I think since I need some major database work done, and preferably without doing to much coding, I think my best option is to put it an an external platform. Right now I am playing with Appery. I'll let you know how it goes once I make some progress :o) 

TomL

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May 15, 2013, 2:51:23 PM5/15/13
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I would second Matt R's recommendation for using an sqlite database to supplement what Tasker can do.

If I'm designing something in Tasker that makes use of an sqlite database, here's how I do it:

1. Open a shell on a terminal app and play around with shell commands that do sqlite things (create table, insert, select, etc...)
2. Once I have a database structure I'm happy with, I write some shell scripts that contain the various sqlite commands I'll need:  createTable.sh, runQuery.sh, etc.
3. I'll play around with running the shell scripts by hand until I'm sure that they work as intended, then I'll use Tasker's Script > RunShell action to run the shell scripts that run the sqlite commands that do the database work.
4. Extra bonus.  If I want to kick off anything at the shell prompt, I have shell scripts I can launch by hand.  No need to get to a Tasker shortcut to the task.

This way, I can easily troubleshoot each step.  Trying to do it all in one go:

Tasker RunShell -> sqlite3

... is frustration incarnate if things go awry.

Tom
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