Flexible Schedules

Power Manager’s schedule is flexible. The schedule can adapt to sudden and unplanned changes in your routine.

To understand how flexible the schedule can be, it is helpful to understand a little about how your events are put into practice within Power Manager.

When one of your events is scheduled, Power Manager takes a copy of the event and sets up everything needed for the triggers. During this stage your event’s date and time based triggers are evaluated and added to the pending events list.

Pending Events

The pending events list is the list of events you can see in Power Manager’s status menu bar. The pending events list contains one entry for each pending trigger. If an event has two triggers, the event will be listed twice in the pending events list. Each entries will be associated with one of the event’s triggers.

An event’s pending triggers can also be viewed in the Power Manager application. Within the application, click on the disclosure triangle next to an event to see additional information. The additional information includes the event’s pending trigger times.

The pending events list is time based. Only triggers that can be predicted are included. Most of the Schedule Assistant’s tasks create predictable triggers. Predictable triggers include daily and one time triggers.

Triggers that do not deal with dates, such as inactivity triggers, are not included in the pending events list. This is because these triggers can not be predicted. Power Manager can not know if the trigger is pending or not. No fixed date can be calculated for these triggers. Helpfully, events with unpredictable triggers are unlikely to be those you wish to adjust or reschedule, as they have no fixed schedule to begin with.

If an event has two triggers, and one trigger can be predicted, then the predictable trigger will appear in the pending events list. The second unpredictable trigger will not appear.

Altering Pending Events

A pending event can be altered. You can adjust the trigger time, cancel the trigger, or reset trigger back to its original time. The ability to alter the pending events list is powerful and provides flexibility needed for Power Manager to work seamlessly in the real world.

When you alter your schedule, you are altering the pending events list and not the original event.

Your request to alter a trigger will only affect that pending instance of the trigger. Once that pending instance is triggered, any adjustments are discarded and the scheduler returns to using the original trigger.

This behaviour allows your schedule to be repeatedly adjusted without affecting your underlying events.

Who Can Alter Pending Events?

By default, only users who have administrator rights can alter pending events.

Power Manager uses the macOS authentication and authorisation services to manage the security of your schedule, and determine which users have specific rights.

If you want to change the rights of who can adjust, cancel, or reset pending events, see pmd’s documentation in the Power Manager Administrator documentation.

Procedure 5.6. Adjust a Pending Event

1. Click on the Power Manager status menu bar.

2. Locate the event to adjust.

3. Select Adjust… from the event’s sub-menu:

   Power Manager Status Menu > Event > Adjust…

4. Power Manager Access will launch.

5. Enter the desired date and time to adjust the event to.

6. Click the Adjust button to apply the adjustment.

Procedure 5.7. Cancel a Pending Event

1. Click on the Power Manager status menu bar.

2. Locate the event to cancel.

3. Select Cancel from the event’s sub-menu:

   Power Manager Status Menu > Event > Cancel

Procedure 5.8. Reset a Previously Adjusted Pending Event

1. Click on the Power Manager status menu bar.

2. Locate the event to reset.

3. Hold down the Control key on the keyboard. The event’s Adjust… menu item will change to Reset.

4. Select Reset from the event’s sub-menu:

   Power Manager Status Menu > Event (Control) Reset