In this episode, we're starting to bring everything together by building our main service availability generator. Up until now, we've set up how to check when employees are available and created a slot generator to build a list of potential booking slots. But here, we take it up a notch: our new class will combine employees and services to figure out all the possible slot options for a given date range.
We kick things off by setting up the ServiceSlotAvailability class. This class takes in a collection of employees and a single service (like a 30 or 45 minute haircut, for example) and, given a start and end date, figures out which slots are up for grabs. At first, we just generate empty slots for the chosen period using the duration of the service—this means the number of slots will change if the service duration changes!
Next, we make sure our code can easily handle different date ranges (like a single day, or a whole week), and always uses the service's actual duration. Once the slots are generated, we get to the interesting part: we loop through all the employees and—using the availability logic we set up earlier—plan to filter these slots by who is actually free and when.
At the end of this episode, we haven't implemented the actual filtering yet, but we've set up the structure and talked through the steps: grabbing each employee's availability, removing slots that overlap with their existing appointments, adding available employee references to the slot ranges, and cleaning up any slots where there's no one available. In the next episode, we'll dive into connecting each employee's availability to these slots and fine-tuning all the filtering logic!