In this episode, we're taking our existing slot range generator—which gives us a plain old Laravel collection of custom date objects—and making it way more useful for our booking app. Instead of using the default collection, we're going to create our own custom DateCollection class that extends Laravel's collection, so we'll have all the usual collection goodness plus some special, booking-specific helper methods.
We start by building this DateCollection class and move our dates into it. The big benefit here is we can now add helpful methods, like figuring out the first available date with open slots. This is really handy for the UI, so users don't have to scroll through days with no availability just to find the next open date.
Once we've got our custom collection in place, we implement a quick helper that finds the first date with available slots. We play around with it, update the web routes, and see it in action. For example, if today has no slots left, the code automatically picks the next available day. It makes the booking experience feel smoother for your users.
By the end of this video, you'll know how to set up a custom collection, add useful methods, and hook that straight into your UI. Next up, we'll write some tests to make sure everything works as expected, and then we can move on to building out the basic interface in Laravel!