In this episode, we're building on our understanding of working with date periods using the Carbon library. We start by clearing out the previous example code and focus on what you need when working with a calendar: defining a clear start and end date for your period.
We explicitly set up a period starting from today (using the start of the day) and ending at the end of the day one month from now. It's explained why it's important to use the end of day, so the range covers the full days you intend, not just up to the current hour.
Next, we introduce how to break up this period into individual days. You'll see how to use Carbon's Period class to easily generate all the dates between your start and end points. We then collect all those days, turn them into a Laravel collection, and iterate over them.
From there, we show how to extract the specific day of the week for each date, which means you can later check database records for employee availability per day (since employees don't always work every single day).
Finally, with this list of days and their names, you'll have the groundwork to determine when an employee is available, day-by-day, within your requested period. This is a crucial building block for setting up flexible and accurate schedule and appointment logic. We'll use this foundation in the next episode to actually find available periods for each employee!