In this episode, we focus on making our date picker smarter and faster—specifically, loading future availability one month at a time as the user navigates the calendar, rather than dumping a year's worth of data all at once (which would slow things down a lot).
We start by hooking into the calendar's render event, so that every time the user changes months, we're ready to fetch new availability data for just the month they're viewing. We set up event listeners, console log the output, and ensure we only make this request once per month switch (to avoid duplicate network requests).
Next, we use Inertia's router to send a new query string to the server for the month we care about. On the backend, we tweak the controller to handle the new calendar query parameter and use it to fetch only the relevant dates. We also pass this value back down to the frontend so we can keep everything in sync and make sure we're not endlessly re-requesting the same data (which would cause an infinite loop).
We end up with a calendar that gracefully lets users click through month after month, always showing the most up-to-date availability, and gracefully handling scenarios where a month has no available dates. It's a slick, responsive improvement over the old way—and crucial for apps with a lot of scheduling data!