In this episode, we're diving into how the calendar actually generates all those available booking slots you saw at the start of the course. The idea is to create a flexible slot generator that can make slots for any date range (like today and tomorrow) and for any service duration, like 30-minute appointments.
We start off by looking at how we'd want our data to look—a simple list of dates, each containing its own set of slots. Inside every slot, we'll eventually be able to see which employees are available to fulfill it, but we're not building that part just yet.
We walk through building a SlotRangeGenerator
class. This takes a start date, an end date, and a slot duration in minutes. It spits out collections of dates, and for each date, it generates the correct number of slots (like every 30 minutes from midnight to midnight). We also make it clear this is the broadest set of possible slots—later on, we'll filter these according to employee availability.
To keep everything organized, we build custom classes for date and slot objects, so each date can hold its own list of slots, and each slot can eventually hold information about available employees. By the end, we've got a nice structure: for any date range and service interval, you get a neatly packaged set of slots ready for employees to be slotted into!
Next episode, we'll tie in employee schedules and availability—pulling our earlier work together to show which employees can fill which slots.