Question

I’m working on creating a Rails app that allows users to set availability Sunday through Saturday, with a start time, end time, and location (simple string). I have an User object and I’m unsure of how to continue. I know I could have a large set of Time objects like so:

class User
    field :mondayStartTime, :type => Time
    field :mondayEndTime, :type => Time
    field :mondayLocation, :type => String
    field :tuesdayStartTime, :type => Time
    field :tuesdayEndTime, :type => Time
    field :tuesdayLocation, :type => String
    ...
    field :sundayEndTime, :type => Time
    field :sundayLocation, :type => String
end

However, this seems terribly inefficient, though creating another unique object class seems just as bad and only results in more lines of code. Is there an easier way of implementing start/end times for a Sunday through Saturday schedule?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At first glance, I’d create an “Availability” model/class (or something less prone to misspelling like “Schedule”) with the attributes of start_at, end_at, location, and day_of_week – and have that class belong to the User (and with the User having a “has_many :availabilities” or “has_many :schedules”). That seems (again at first glance) to be the most efficient and easiest to get the data back out – and you can use that separate class to do things like grouping schedules/availabilities together more easily.