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18. Using a custom date collection
Episodes
01. Introduction
02. Core functionality
03. How we build up availability
7m 55s
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04. Employees and services
7m 39s
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05. Employee schedules and exclusions
7m 53s
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06. Setting up appointments
5m 34s
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07. Working with date periods
10m 4s
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08. Iterating over requested days in a period
4m 51s
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09. Adding schedule availability
15m 38s
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10. Subtracting employee schedule exclusions
7m 53s
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11. Excluding time already passed
2m 57s
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12. Writing tests for schedule availability
19m 50s
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13. Generating slots
14m 47s
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14. Building the service availability generator
7m 5s
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15. Adding employees into slots
9m 44s
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16. Removing empty slots
4m 42s
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17. Removing slots with booked appointments
6m 44s
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18. Using a custom date collection
3m 34s
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19. Writing tests for service availablity
18m 42s
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03. Building the booking UI
04. Building the availability calendar
05. Booking appointments
31. Hooking up customer appointment details
5m 17s
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32. Disabling future steps
2m 43s
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33. Storing an appointment
14m 43s
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34. Handling appointment collisions
8m 1s
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35. Redirecting to a confirmation page
2m 55s
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36. Building the appointment confirmation page
5m 40s
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37. Cancelling an appointment
5m 30s
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Transcript
00:00
So our slot range generator gives us back a collection of these custom date objects.
00:05
And that's fine. But if we think about it, we want some general helper methods to determine things like the first available date. So we want to know when we show our calendar,
00:17
what date should we put in there as the first available date. We don't just want to put today. We want the UI to be convenient so we can help the user out when they're booking.
00:27
So what we're going to do is we're going to change this collection here, which is just a standard Laravel collection, over to a custom collection.
00:34
And I'm going to add one helper method in here to demonstrate how this works. What we'll then do is when we're building up the UI, we can add any more methods in here that we need.
00:43
OK, so to create a custom collection, we're just going to go ahead and create this out here. So I'm going to call this DateCollection. And we'll go ahead and just fill everything out
00:53
that we need inside of here. And this is just going to be a standard class, so DateCollection. And this is going to extend the base Laravel collection. That's pretty much all we need to do to get this working.
01:09
So now what we can do in here is just new up a new DateCollection. And that's all we need to do. So now the only difference is this is now a DateCollection.
01:18
It has all of the functionality of a collection. So it's going to work in exactly the same way. But we just have a custom one. So in here, we can now start to add some helpful methods.
01:28
For example, the really important part of this is, like I just said, the first available date. So for example, if you're booking today and there are no more slots available for today
01:37
or tomorrow or the next day, we want to show the first date that's available for bookings. So let's go ahead and implement this. Then we will go and just dump it out in our web routes.
01:47
And then, of course, we're going to write our tests in the next episode. OK, so we're going to go ahead and say this. And we're working within a collection still.
01:54
So we can use this really, really handy first helper on a collection. This will grab the first record, of course. But it can also be passed a closure.
02:03
So for example, I could add a condition of when I should grab the first one. So in here, we're going to go ahead and grab the date. And we're going to return DateSlotsCount
02:16
is greater than or equal to 1. So basically, iterate over all of the dates that we have and return the first one where we have slots. That's pretty much what we need to do there.
02:29
OK, let's go ahead and try this out over on our web routes just to get a feel for this. And then we're pretty much done. And we can add to this as we need.
02:37
So I'm going to say availability first available date. And let's see what we get. Give that a refresh. And here we go.
02:45
So this is today. We do have slots for today. Let's just take a look at them slots. And as you can see, we've got all of them slots.
02:54
Now, if we just go ahead and change this around, and I set this to, say, 5 o'clock today, obviously, we don't have any slots after 5 because our employees only work up until 5.
03:06
So if we now go over and give that a refresh, you'll see that this has switched over to tomorrow. So now when we render this on the UI, that is the date that's going to be available despite the fact
03:16
that today is the current date. So there we go. So that's just a really quick switch around of a collection so we can add any custom methods we
03:24
need into that collection to help us out when we're building the UI. OK, let's go ahead and write these tests. And then we can get on with building a basic UI in Laravel.
37 episodes•4 hrs 49 mins•1 year ago
Overview
Building an availability calendar and booking system is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. That’s exactly what we’re going to cover in this course.
Step by step, we’ll build an appointment slot generator that calculates availability based on employee schedules, employee’s booked time off, the length of service chosen, existing appointments, and cancelled appointments.
For maximum flexibility, we’ll also allow multi-employee availability checks, so we’ll be able to see every employee who can perform a service (and their available slots).
To finish up, we’ll build a simple UI with Alpine.js, with a beautiful booking calendar that shows detailed availability across multiple dates, the ability to choose a time slot — and finally the ability to book an appointment.
Phew. We’ve got a lot to learn — let’s build a booking system with Laravel!
Alex Garrett-Smith
Hey, I'm the founder of Codecourse!
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