Question

I was wondering what the best approach would be to validate a date is within the correct opening hours of a shop…

I am creating a website for a golf professional and am taking bookings for lessons on it. I have used fullCalendar for the calendar and integrated it with google calendar so it can be easily sync’d to the pro’s mobile easily etc.

As part of the calendar, when a customer clicks on a time slot I am provided with a date object by fullcalendar. I want to validate that this selected slot falls within the opening times of the shop for lessons to be taken etc.

The times will be retrieved from a db table at some point but I can have them returned in JSON onto the page if it works best – but thats not the purpose of this question…

The opening hours differ depending on the day of the week as well as the “season” [summer times -vs- winter times]

ie:
 Summer Times
    Monday = 10:00 - 21:00
    Tuesday = 10:00 - 21:00
    Wednesday = 10:00 - 21:00
    Thursday = 10:00 - 21:00
    Friday = 10:00 - 21:00
    Saturday = 08:00 - 18:00
    Sunday = 08:00 - 18:00

 Winter Times
    Monday = CLOSED
    Tuesday = 10:00 - 18:30
    Wednesday = 10:00 - 18:30
    Thursday = 12.00 – 20.30
    Friday = 12.00 – 20.30
    Saturday = 08:00 - 18:00
    Sunday = 08:00 - 18:00

What would the “best” way be to validate this?

would the best option be to simply do nested if/switch statements..

[sudo code]
if(summer}
{
    switch(date.getDay())
    {
    case 1:
          if(time > mondayOpeningTime && time < mondayCloseTime)
          {
            return true;
          }
          else
          {
            return false;
          }
      break;
    case 2:
      execute code block 2
      break;
    .....
    default:
      code to be executed if n is different from case 1 and 2
    }
}
else
{
    // Same as summer logic but for winter times etc..
} 

Or is there a better way of doing this?

Apologies for the long post/question but thanks in advance to anyone who spends the time reading and responding to it 🙂

Chris

Answer 1

You want 2 arrays: openingTimes and closingTimes. First dimension will be season, second dimension will be day of the week. Then it’s just:

return ((time > openingTimes[season, dayOfWeek]) && (time < closingTimes[season, dayOfWeek]));