I am currently building a Ruby on Rails application for students to book workshop classes with instructors. I am seeking some advice regarding the models setup.
I have already looked at this & this stack overflow threads, but they do not answer my questions.
Functionality required:
- Instructor needs to be able to set weekly-repeating timeslots available for booking
- Instructor needs to be able to open up additional one-off timeslots in addition to the weekly-repeating slots
- Instructor needs to be able to remove available timeslots on a one-off basis, e.g. when instructor goes on vacation
- Classes are not limited to one student, classes can have as many students as the teacher wishes
- All classes are one-hour long, so only start time needs to be considered
My current proposal:
I'm considering setting it up three models and three tables. The three models all connect to the same workshop controller.
Example data uses the following scenario: Tom has classes every Mon & Tue 9am, but for next week only, he is switching his Tue classes to be held on Wed.
The idea is that I have a model that lists all the teachers' classes. I have another model for the recurring timeslots for each of the teacher's classes. I then have a third model for exceptions that acts as a list of 'changes' to the weekly-repeating classes times:
workshop model linked to workshop table:
ID | Workshop Name | Price
1 | Tom's Class | 100
workshop_times_recurring model linked to workshop_times_recurring table:
ID | Workshop ID | Times
1 | 1 | {Monday 0900, Tuesday 0900}
workshop_times_other model linked to workshop_times_other table:
ID | Workshop ID | Type | Time
1 | 1 | Active | {2017May31 09am}
2 | 1 | Inactive| {2017May30 09am}
My questions are:
- Is this the most elegant way to set up the models for my app and I'm not completely off-track? If not, what is a better solution?
- I am hoping that I am able to parse strings like
'Monday 0900, Tuesday 0900'and'2017May31 09am'such that information can be shown correctly on a javascript-driven datetime selection calendar. Will my current setup allow me to achieve this on the frontend?
