Question

Problem: I have a list containg hours, for example:
08:15:00
08:45:00
09:00:00
12:00:00
…
application is allowing user to make an appointment for a specific hour let’say: 8:15:00, each meeting takes half an hour.

Question: How to determine if there is a slot needed for appointment like this? I know that Calendar class have methods before() nad after(), but it doesn’solve my problem. I mean if there is appointment at 12:00 and another one at 12:00, how to prevent before making another one at 12:15?

edit:

I’ve tried using methods I mentioned before, like:

Calendar cal1 = Calendar.getInstance(); // for example 12:00:00
Calendar cal2 = Calendar.getInstance(); // for exmaple 12:30:00
Calendar userTime = Calendar.getInstance(); // time to test: 12:15:00

if(user.after(cal1)&& user.before(cal2)){
... // do sth
}

Answer 1

Check if the date to check is between the two provided:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm");
Date before = sdf.parse("07/05/2012 08:00");
Date after = sdf.parse("07/05/2012 08:30");
Date toCheck = sdf.parse("07/05/2012 08:15");
//is toCheck between the two?
boolean isAvailable = (before.getTime() < toCheck.getTime()) && after.getTime() > toCheck.getTime();

To book for a determinate hour, I would do a class with two dates and a method to check this:

public class Appointment{

 private Date start;
 private Date end;

 public boolean isBetween(Date toCheck){....}

}

Then you can simply do an Schedule class extending ArrayList, adding a method isDateAvailable(Date toCheck), iterating the list of Appointments and checking that there is no one conflicting.