Calendars and Group Scheduling

Doug — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:05:04 -0500

It’s been a pretty good couple of days for Rails coding. I’ve done a bunch of validation tweaks, mostly finished the calendar, and begun on group scheduling.

I was having problems using embedded hidden forms for all my edit and add links on events. I did a couple things to improve the performance of the page. First, I ditched the embedded forms and made them separate page loads. It was cool to have the embedded forms the magically appear and disappear; I miss it. Several people suggested I just embed a single edit form and a single add form and use Javascript to update the values before it’s submitted. If I were a Javascript stud that’s what I’d do. Maybe when I’m all grown up I’ll be smart enough to do that.

The other thing I did was change how I tested for events on calendar days. I had a find_by_day method that would basically find(:all).select { |expr| expr.occurs_on?(day) }. I’d then loop over the calendar days calling that function. What I decided to do instead was simply collect all the TimeExpressions into a single list in the controller and let the view do the select for each day. This exposes more of the model’s logic a little. I like the way the code looks to simply calll find_by_day for each day. However, only doing one find and then doing the selects in the view shaved a fair amount of time off the page load.

So I’m doing some “group scheduling” too. It’s quite limited. The TimeExpressions I’ve been working with is really to build a “free-busy” schedule of available times to book appointments. What I need to do is allow a user to invite another user to an appointment. These two users may have to negotiate an appointment time. So, it makes sense for my Invitations to acts_as_versioned. I had seen acts_as_versioned discussed a couple times on the maling list. Let me just say, I’m really happy with it. I was able to set it up without too much fuss. It works pretty much exactly as advertised. Thanks technoweenie!

Finally, to send out the initial invitations I finally got around to coding some AJAX stuff. It’s quite simple; just a link that makes a single request to send the invitation. I felt so sophisticated! Only about an hour or so to get it studied, written, tested and committed.

@Lathi.net: Calendars and Group Scheduling

Calendars and Group Scheduling