In this episode, we're tackling the problem of appointment collisions—those annoying situations where two people might book the same slot at the same time. We want to make sure our system prevents double bookings and provides helpful feedback to our users if someone else nabs their time slot while they're trying to book.
To solve this, we start by adding a check in our appointment creation logic. Right before we insert an appointment, we verify if the slot is still available using our service slot availability class. If it turns out the slot is already taken, we stop the booking and send an error message back to the frontend. We're also writing a little helper method—containsSlot
—so we can cleanly check if our collection of available slots actually includes the one the user wants.
Next, we test this whole flow by manually adding and attempting conflicting bookings, ensuring our system properly detects the collision. Whenever a user tries to book a taken slot, we throw back a 409 Conflict response and show a clear error message right on the page using Alpine.js, so they're immediately aware of the issue. Finally, we apply a bit of basic styling to the error feedback to keep the user experience smooth and friendly.
By the end of this video, we've got a solid, user-friendly way to handle booking collisions and prevent double appointments!