In this episode, we're starting to bring everything together to generate service availability slots based on multiple employees and a specific service. So far, we've built the pieces for checking an employee's working periods and generating empty slot ranges, but now it's time to build our main class—ServiceSlotAvailability
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We walk through setting up this new class, which takes in a collection of employees and a service. The goal is to generate and filter the slot options for bookings based on who is available and what service duration is needed. First, we sketch out the basic structure, including a method for generating slots within a given period (start and end dates).
Using the slot range generator we built earlier, we generate a list of time slots for the requested days, factoring in the actual service duration. This means our availability adapts automatically if the service gets longer or shorter, and you can easily check availability for a day or even a week just by tweaking the period.
Then, we discuss the next pieces: looping over each employee to check their actual availability (including not offering already-booked times), and marking which employees are available for each slot. In this episode, we're just stubbing that part out and planning our next steps—removing unavailable slots and employees as needed.
By the end, we have the skeleton in place for our service slot generator, and we tee up the next episode for implementing the detailed employee availability filtering. If you want to see how multiple schedules and bookings come together, you'll want to stick around for the next part!