In this episode, we're diving into the nitty-gritty of how to actually build up employee availability—yep, we're talking about creating all those possible time slots for appointments, and making sure they accurately reflect who’s free, when, and for how long.
We'll kick things off by focusing on employee schedules. Since people can have pretty long windows of availability (think months or a year), we're not entering data week-by-week. Instead, we save each employee’s broad timeframe (like their start and end dates), then break it down by which days of the week they work, and the hours they're available on each of those days. You can even set certain days to null to indicate they’re totally off.
Next, we take exclusions into account—things like days off for holidays or personal time. This way, the overall availability reflects both regular working patterns and any exceptions. Of course, we also can’t forget about appointments that have already been booked—those need to get chopped out from the available slots.
From here, we get practical: say we want to check which slots are available today for a 30-minute haircut. We create a list of possible 30-minute slots from midnight to midnight, but only fill in the times when an employee (like Alex) is actually working. For example, if Alex works 9-to-5, only those slots show up. We further filter by making sure slots don’t go right up to the end of someone's shift, and we exclude any already-booked appointments.
What's cool is that this works for one employee or across several—so you can ask, “Show me all the possible haircut slots for today, and which employees can do them.” The result is a collection of usable slots, each with info on which employees are free for that timeframe.
We also briefly touch on how this logic scales across multiple days or weeks, so you can generate availability for longer windows if needed. And while all this might sound a bit abstract, we’ll build it step by step in code, making it much clearer as you see it come to life.
By the end, you'll have a much clearer picture of how all these pieces fit together to generate those all-important availability slots, ready to display to your users with speed and accuracy!