In this episode, we dive into the process of generating slots for a scheduling or booking system. If you remember from earlier, we wanted our slots to be organized by dates—so for today, tomorrow, or any future day, we want to see all the available time slots for that date, and the employees who could fulfill them.
We start by outlining what our slot data should look like: a nested structure with days at the top level, slots within each day, and eventually employees who can fill those slots. To achieve this, we create a SlotGenerator class, which takes a date range (like today through tomorrow) and an interval (like 60 or 90 minutes).
Inside the SlotGenerator, we use Carbon to iterate through the days and, for each day, through the available times based on the chosen interval. We start building a nice collection of Day objects, each holding Slot objects for the appropriate time blocks. Along the way, we set up utility methods like addSlot to help structure our data properly.
We test out our structure along the way by dumping results to make sure we’re getting the right dates and time slots. You’ll see that changing the service duration directly updates the number and distribution of slots per day. For example, choosing a 90-minute service will give you fewer slots per day compared to a 60-minute one.
By the end, we have a flexible slot generation system: it lets us see which slots are available for each day, and it can easily be tied into calendar views or booking systems. Next steps will involve filtering the slots more realistically and, most importantly, connecting employees to slots based on their availability.