I am looking to build an appointment booking app with the following characteristics: - Users can be service providers or buyers - Service providers set their availabilities (but can only set their availabilities at a maximum of 6 months ahead) - Buyers can then book appointments based on those availabilities - each appointment, based on the type of service, takes a different amount of time - Based on the appointment that a buyer selects, a different set of availabilities is shown depending on how long the service takes
What I've built is the following:
- A TimeSlot model where I create a number of generic 30 minute time slots based on a start_time and end_time attribute. In order to make these time slots extend 6 months into the future, I have a background job running each day that creates all the new time slots necessary
class TimeSlot < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :user_time_slots
# ... more methods below
end
- A UserTimeSlots model that basically represents a service provider's availability that they can set. So when they create a user_time_slot, they are essentially saying that they are available at that time.
class UserTimeSlot < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :time_slot
belongs_to :service_provider, :class_name => "User"
belongs_to :appointment
end
- An Appointment model that has many user_time_slots. It has many because an appointment belongs to a service which takes a certain amount of time (a time_required attribute on services) and it might span a number consecutive user_time_slots.
class Appointment < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :user_time_slots
belongs_to :buyer, :class_name => "User"
belongs_to :service_provider, :class_name => "User"
belongs_to :service
end
- A Service model that has many appointments and belongs to a service provider who creates that service.
class Service < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :appointments
belongs_to :service_provider, :class_name => "User"
end
This domain model works; however, I am wondering if there is a better way to do this because of the following:
It seems a little clunky to me to be creating TimeSlot records every day on my backend using a background job - the TimeSlots really have the sole purpose of having a start and end time and then being associated to.
- Once the user (buyer) selects a service they want, I am not sure how I would efficiently find the x number of user_time_slots that are consecutive and, therefore, available for booking the appointment (for example, if I have 30 minute time slot intervals and a user selects an appointment that will take 3 hours, I would have to find 6 consecutive time slots). For example, if a user clicks on an instance of a service I would have to 1) get the time required for that service (easy enough to do) and 2) I'd have to find ALL of the user's user_time_slots and collect their associated time_slots, then compare each time slot's start and end times to one another to find consecutive ones. This just seems like way too much iteration to me and seems like this will bog down my application!
Does anyone have a better way or solution to do this (particularly around the topic of finding consecutive time slots)?
