In this episode, we start by refactoring our plain date collection and swap it out for a custom DateCollection class. There's a good reason for this! By having our own class, we can make it the single source of truth for all the slots we create in our app, which will make things much easier to manage going forward.
Right now, our slots system is a bit messy. We have too many slots, and we're not pushing any employees into them yet, but setting up the custom collection now is going to make it much easier to enhance our logic later. For example, we'll soon add helper methods—like one to grab the first available (empty) date, and another to check if a slot exists for a particular day.
We create a new DateCollection class and make it extend Laravel's base Collection class so it works just like a regular collection. For now, we're not adding any new methods yet—just switching over our code to use this new class. This means everything works exactly the same, but we're set up to keep our date logic organized as we move on. Give your app a refresh and you probably won't see any difference, but we'll thank ourselves later for making things easier to extend!