In this episode, we dive deeper into working with date periods in our application. We start by removing some example code and setting up a period from today to one month ahead, making sure we start at the beginning of today and end at the end of the last day of our period. This ensures we're covering all the days completely, not just part-way through the day.
Next, we break down that date range into individual days using Carbon's Period
object. This is super useful because when checking things like employee availability, we need to look at each day separately—it's rare for someone to work every single day! By iterating over each day, we can apply our logic (like checking which days an employee works) on a day-by-day basis.
We use a Laravel collection to loop through each day, and for each date, we figure out which day of the week it is. This helps us match the day's name to the employee's assigned working days, making it easy to see if they're free on a particular day.
By the end of the episode, we've got all our days nicely listed out, each linked to its day name, and we're ready to move forward with associating employee availability to these dates. Next up, we'll focus on making those availability checks against our appointments system!