One feature that didn’t quite make the cut in the release of Unicorn was the dragging and dropping of shifts in the roster builder. There was a couple of reasons why but it primarily came down to the performance overhead it was adding and how this negatively impacted clients with big rosters and/or Internet Explorer.
Over the last month the guys have been busy working out how to get it back in, without impacting the overall load times. Like most things around here, it resulted in a re-evaluation of the feature plus a rebuild of most of it’s supporting functionality.
As a result, not only have we added drag & drop back in, we’ve made it better by automatically checking where you can drop shifts you are dragging based on the role assigned (or the staff assigned, if your in role view). You can also drag and drop shifts on published rosters and in the day coverage views. 
Not ONLY that, we’ve:
- Increased the maximum roster size around 50% to around 3,000 cells (that’s 100 staff rostered on a month at a time).
- Decreased the time it takes to load the roster after you’ve click ‘Work on roster’ by 35%.
- Truly fixed the left column so it doesn’t ‘jump’ around a row at a time.
- Re-designed the roster publish dialog box with a handy alert summary.
- General cleanup of styles and improved visibility of the all-important roster budget.
- Increased compatibility for touchscreen devices.
I’m really proud of what the guys have achieved and would happily challenge any of our web-based rostering system competitors to spit out a larger workable roster.
Happy rostering!
Note: All above benchmarking has been done in Chrome, our recommended browser. Similar gains have been achieved in other modern browsers. And Internet Explorer.