Vault structure

CtrlTime needs three object types. A vault that already records time can keep the objects it has, provided they carry the properties below with the right data types.

How the pieces relate

An employee object represents a person, and refers to their M-Files account through a lookup property. Exactly one employee object should point at each user account — two makes a time booking ambiguous, and nothing detects that for you.

A time object is one entry. It has a name, a start and an end, a number of hours, the employee it belongs to, and a reference to whatever the time was spent on. Classes on this object type are how one deployment separates, say, internal time from customer time.

Start and end are timestamps, not dates. A date property loses the time of day, and the calendar cannot place the entry.

A week object groups an employee’s time entries into a week. Moving an entry from one week to another in the calendar selects or creates the right week object, and moving a week from draft to approval takes its time entries with it. This is the object type most vaults do not already have.

Work types are optional but worth having

A work type on a time entry is what makes the reporting dashboard able to answer what the time was spent doing, rather than only who spent it and on what. It is a value list, and adding it later means the entries booked before it have none.

CtrlTime binds 18 settings to something that has to exist in the vault, 0 of them required. Everything below is generated from the shipping application, so nothing it needs is missing from this list.

Object types

Create these first; classes and properties hang off them.

Needed for	Configuration section	Required
Object Type	Time configuration	Optional
Object Type	Week configuration	Optional

Classes

Each belongs to one of the object types above.

Needed for	Configuration section	Required
Class	Week configuration	Optional

Properties

The data type is not advice. A property of the wrong type cannot be selected for the setting at all.

Needed for	Configuration section	Data type	Required
Employee Property	Configuration	Lookup or Multi Select Lookup	Optional
Start Timestamp Property	Configuration	Timestamp	Optional
End Timestamp Property	Configuration	Timestamp	Optional
Week Property	Time configuration	Lookup or Multi Select Lookup	Optional
Week Number Property	Week configuration	Integer	Optional
Year Number Property	Week configuration	Integer	Optional

Workflows

One per object type that the application drives through states.

Needed for	Configuration section	Required
Workflow	Time workflow	Optional
Workflow	Week workflow	Optional

Workflow states

States within the workflows above. Entering one is what triggers the work.

Needed for	Configuration section	Required
Draft State	Time workflow	Optional
Sent to Admin State	Time workflow	Optional
Approved State	Time workflow	Optional
Draft State	Week workflow	Optional
Sent to Admin State	Week workflow	Optional
Approved State	Week workflow	Optional
Rejected State	Week workflow	Optional

Generated from CtrlTime 1.26.1.0.

Check

• Exactly one employee object points at each user account.
• The time object’s start and end properties are timestamps, and its hours property is a real number rather than an integer.
• A week object can be created with a year, a week number and an employee.

Next

Set up CtrlTime — step three, configuring CtrlTime against these objects.