In this episode, we dive into customizing our calendar to show how many appointment slots are available for each day — super useful for users wanting to book!
We start by hooking into the calendar's events, working directly with the event data when the calendar is rendered. After a quick walkthrough of what these events contain (like the date, view, and actual HTML target element), we use JavaScript to dynamically add slot information directly into each day's square.
Next, we improve the calendar's appearance by overriding default styles with custom CSS, making each day larger and tweaking colors to match our app's vibe. Then, we handle a little gotcha: the slot indicator was getting duplicated, so we guard against that by only creating the indicator if it doesn't exist yet.
We then wire things up so the number of slots for each day appears, using data we already fetch and format. For an extra finishing touch, we add pluralization (so it says ‘1 slot’ or ‘2 slots’ as appropriate) using a handy JS library.
By the end, our calendar not only looks better but now gives clear slot availability for each day. Coming up next, we’ll show available slots for today by default and update this as you click on other days, getting us closer to a fully interactive booking interface!