User preferences

Default preferences
Hourly rate
Timezone
Kimai Theme
Minimize sidebar
Initial calendar view
Initial view after login
Show daily statistics in timesheet
Adding new UserPreference
- Displaying and exporting UserPreferences

A user has several preferences, which changes the behaviour how he interacts with Kimai.

These settings can be edited by:

the user with preferences_own_profile permission for himself
by users owning the preferences_other_profile permission for every user

The user preferences can be accessed via the users menu in the upper-right or via the user administration (needs view_user permission).

Default preferences

You can configure default values for new users in your local.yaml like this:

kimai:
    defaults:
        user:
            timezone: Europe/London
            language: de
            theme: purple

These settings can also be configured directly in the System / Settings within Kimai.

Hourly rate

A fallback for records without any customer/project/activity specific rate (see rate calculation).

Needs hourly-rate_own_profile / hourly-rate_other_profile permission to see and edit.

Timezone

The user-specific timezone is used when recording users timesheet entries.

By default, this is the servers timezone (php.ini: date.timezone), which is often wrong or not matching the users real timezone (for technical reasons like shared hosting, docker, UTC). If you experience wrong times when starting a record, please check this setting first and tell your users to do the same.

Kimai can handle arbitrary timezones, so it is no problem to record the work of your global distributed team. Each timesheet record will use the timezone, which was active when the record was started. If you change the timezone while a record is running, it will only influence the next started record.

Kimai saves times in UTC, including the timezone information, so it can calculate the correct time to display it in the frontend.

Kimai Theme

A Kimai theme is mainly a set of colors for the top bar and side navigation. This setting can be changed by the user to match the personal style.

This setting changes the behaviour of the left sidebar after a page (re-)load.

If activated, the sidebar is collapsed and only shown:

on hover (on desktops)
on clicks (tablets)
when the burger icon is clicked

This setting is useful for smaller screens (like tablets and laptops), which need more space.

Small sreens like mobile phones will not see the sidebar, they always have to use the burger menu.

Initial calendar view

A user can decide which calendar view is most useful for personal work style:

month
week
day

The initial view for the calendar is month.

If no translations are available for your language, the options might be called: month, agendaWeek, agendaDay.

This setting changes the target page for:

redirect after login
click on the header (both mobile and desktop)

If a user configured the preference login.initial_view to calendar, the timesheet icon in the top navigation bar on mobile devices will be replaced by a link to the calendar.

Show daily statistics in timesheet

If activated, the personal timesheet visually groups and shows statistics for all records within one day.

Adding new UserPreference

Developers can register new user preferences from within their plugin as easy as that:

use App\Entity\UserPreference;
use App\Event\UserPreferenceEvent;
use Symfony\Component\EventDispatcher\EventSubscriberInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\Type\CheckboxType;

class UserProfileSubscriber implements EventSubscriberInterface
{
    public static function getSubscribedEvents(): array
    {
        return [
            UserPreferenceEvent::CONFIGURE => ['loadUserPreferences', 200]
        ];
    }

    public function loadUserPreferences(UserPreferenceEvent $event)
    {
        if (null === ($user = $event->getUser())) {
            return;
        }

        // You attach every field to the event and all the heavy lifting is done by Kimai.
        // The value is the default as long as the user has not yet updated his preferences,
        // otherwise it will be overwritten with the users choice, stored in the database.
        $event->addPreference(
            (new UserPreference())
                ->setName('fooooo-bar')
                ->setValue(false)
                ->setType(CheckboxType::class)
        );
    }
}

Displaying and exporting UserPreferences

With Kimai 1.4 you can display and export user preferences. Supported fields will be shown as new columns in the data-table for users. Additionally these preferences will be added to HTML and Spreadsheet exports.

As Kimai cannot query all existing users for possible preferences, you need to listen to a new event and register the desired preference.

use App\Entity\UserPreference;
use App\Event\UserPreferenceDisplayEvent;
use Symfony\Component\EventDispatcher\EventSubscriberInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\Type\CheckboxType;

class UserProfileSubscriber implements EventSubscriberInterface
{
    public static function getSubscribedEvents(): array
    {
        return [
            UserPreferenceDisplayEvent::class => ['loadUserPreferences', 200]
        ];
    }

    public function loadUserPreferences(UserPreferenceDisplayEvent $event)
    {

        // You attach every field to the event and all the heavy lifting is done by Kimai.
        // The value is the default as long as the user has not yet updated his preferences,
        // otherwise it will be overwritten with the users choice, stored in the database.
        $event->addPreference(
            (new UserPreference())
                ->setName('fooooo-bar')
                ->setValue(false)
                ->setType(CheckboxType::class)
        );
    }
}

User preferences