Question

I am creating an online tutor concept based site in django. I am stuck at maintaining the teacher availability timings. e.g. mon-fri 10am-2pm (dont know if it is good approach to keep it like this or you have good idea??) I don’t understand what should be the table structure. Right now what i am thinking is that this will be an array of an array to keep the availability for each time slot in the week. 7 days of the week should be there. e.g. list[7],(list[24], Boolean). Is it good approach?? Using this data structure would not allow me in future to perform filtering based on availability timings. Please suggest me a good method to implement this. Thanks

Answer 1

I would suggest having a model such as:

class Availability(models.Model):
    WEEKDAY_CHOICES = (
        (0, 'Monday'),
        (1, 'Tuesday'),
        (2, 'Wednesday'),
        (3, 'Thursday'),
        (4, 'Friday'),
        (5, 'Saturday'),
        (6, 'Sunday'),
    )

    weekday = models.PositiveSmallIntegerField(choices=WEEKDAY_CHOICES)
    start_time = models.TimeField()
    end_time = moels.TimeField()

class Tutor(models.Model):
    available_times = models.ManyToManyField(Availability)

Then, from there you can query for available tutors right now via:

Tutor.objects.filter(
    available_times__weekday=datetime.weekday(),
    available_times__start_time__lte=time.time(),
    available_times__end_time__gt=time.time()
)