Booking system

[Iluvatar+]

I am at the early stages of developing a booking system (in cakephp) that can be used by both the client and the admins.

The process in which a booking will be made is

Select a treatment ->

Select a therapist (that is linked to the treatment) ->

Select a day ->

Select a time - >

Keep in mind that the day and times will be based on the therapist time sheet which will be inputted by  an admin.

I have already got a clear idea on the majority of the logic of the application although I am having a trouble thinking of a solid logic in how I can display time availability of the therapist. Has anyone one done anything like this before or anything that could help me.

 

[Barand]

Has anyone one done anything like this before

Yes.

 

But we are here to help with specific PHP problems, not provide you with free consultancy advice regarding ideas for the design ofyour application.

[ignace]

Is there only one therapist for each treatment?

 

treatment (tmt_id, trp_id, tmt_name, tmt_desc) -- one-to-many/one-to-one: one therapist for one/many treatment(s)
therapist (trp_id, trp_name)

 

OR

 

treatment (tmt_id, tmt_name, tmt_desc)
therapist (trp_id, trp_name)
therapist_does_treatment (trp_id, tmt_id) -- many-to-many one therapist does many treatments, one treatement is done by many therapists

 

If clients have to login, create a table for those:

 

client (clt_id, clt_fname, clt_lname)

 

Now comes the harder part: a therapist can only treat one client at a time and you must reflect this in your DB. What you must do is create a cron that fills a table with possible appointment dates of say one hour (or longer depending on how long it takes a therapist to treat a client) for the entire year. When a client then makes an appointment you create a relationship between the client, the therapist, and the appointment date so that never 2 clients can make an appointment at the same time.

 

Since I am not gonna write out the entire DB schema I'll leave this up to you partly also because I don't have all information to create this schema like: how long does a particular treatment take? Do therapists only do one particular treatment throughout the day or more? Et cetera...