FrontlineSMS is powerful open source software that turns an ordinary laptop and mobile phone into a low cost communications hub. It's used by NGOS around the world to send and receive text messages for such efforts as human rights monitoring, disaster relief, education programs and fundraising campaigns. It's also at the heart of FrontlineSMS:Medic which is revolutionizing global health by empowering rural healthcare workers.
So when my friend Lucky Gunasekara asked if I could develop a much requested reminder plugin, I jumped at the opportunity. For one, it gave me an excuse to dive into the Frontline source code. And two, it would benefit the entire community.
The Frontline Reminders Plugin allows you to schedule email and SMS reminders for a specific date range occurring once, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.
There was a bit of a learning curve to develop the plugin, especially with my somewhat limited Java, Hibernate and Thinlet experience. Thankfully Alex Anderson and Dieterich Lawson were great help answering my questions on the Frontline Google Group.
The plugin definitely has room for improvement, and I already have a few ideas for additional occurrence types; Every Weekend, Every Weekday, Every Sunday, etc.
You can checkout the source code at: http://github.com/dalezak/FrontlineSMS-Reminders
So when my friend Lucky Gunasekara asked if I could develop a much requested reminder plugin, I jumped at the opportunity. For one, it gave me an excuse to dive into the Frontline source code. And two, it would benefit the entire community.
The Frontline Reminders Plugin allows you to schedule email and SMS reminders for a specific date range occurring once, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.
There was a bit of a learning curve to develop the plugin, especially with my somewhat limited Java, Hibernate and Thinlet experience. Thankfully Alex Anderson and Dieterich Lawson were great help answering my questions on the Frontline Google Group.
The plugin definitely has room for improvement, and I already have a few ideas for additional occurrence types; Every Weekend, Every Weekday, Every Sunday, etc.
You can checkout the source code at: http://github.com/dalezak/FrontlineSMS-Reminders
5 comments:
Dude! Dale you've done the patients at AMPATH in Eldoret, Kenya and the FrontlineSMS community a great service in building the Reminders module for FrontlineSMS. Really quite proud and grateful that you took the time out to build this for us.
Your Gitwe Buddy,
Lucky
hai dale, i sent you an email..would you please to give us the tutorial or step by step to apply this very useful plug in?
We are in Indonesia will be very happy to use this plug in(fyi Indonesia is in three largest position to TB in the world after India and China)
Regard,
Lily Indriani Octovia, MD
the Babakan Sari CHC, Indonesia
Lily, it's great to hear the plugin will soon be used in Indonesia for Tuberculosis research!
The FrontlineSMS team plans to include the plugin in a future release of their app.
I'll connect with them to get an ETA on when it will be available.
thanks you dale for your quick response. We are happy if the feature will be include to the next version of flsms. I hope this new version with reminder plugin will release soon...thanks...
Good news, I just pushed some major changes to the FrontlineSMS Reminders plugin, including an overhaul of the reminder architecture.
Now, each reminder occurrence type is contained in its own subclass, each implementing their own TimerTask.
You can checkout the code changes at: http://github.com/dalezak/FrontlineSMS-Reminders
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