Hello, I was wondering what options exist for managing groups of appointments together. Here is my use case:
Users of the system frequently need to schedule appointments for multiple services being provided to their customer in sequence one after another. (Imagine bringing your car to the mechanic and having the tires changed, oil changed, and a light replaced, all as separate services - kind of like that.) I’ve implemented this by customizing the lightbox to accept multiple services. When the lightbox closes and posts to the server, the server logic parses the services and creates multiple appointment records, one after the other. Then the calendar refreshes from the server by overriding onFullSync event and all the events appear.
This works for adding appointments, but if the customer or user of the calendar wants to change an appointment, they usually want all the appointments to move together. When I add the appointments, I can create a common ID for the group of appointments, and on the update event to the server I can locate related events in that group and move them too. But, visually, the user only sees one appointment being dragged, and it’s confusing because you see one event move, then all of a sudden other appointments move. This also creates complications with collision detection, because the other events are only moved on the server side without running the JS collision detection.
Is there a better way to do this? My preference would be that all appointments that are part of a group move together, and that collision detection and other behaviors work on all of the events.
Please let me know if there is an easier way to do this that I am missing - I just want to make sure before I go too far down this path.
Thanks,
Chris