Appointment Booking Problem

richardson167 · February 21st, 2007, 04:03 AM

Hi,

Could you please prevent me from going mad and re-assure me that it is actually possible to make a booking for the last hour of a given day using the Chapter 10 Appointment Booker.
When I try it, the wizard always says that the time is unavailable.
I have tried this using the code direct from the CD and the modified code from the download site.

Thanks,

Lawrence.

Imar · February 21st, 2007, 01:42 PM

Hi Lawrence,

I just tried it and I ran into the same problem. I then changed the settings to allow booking from 0:00 through 23:00 and then it worked.
Of course this is not ideal as it allows users to make an appointment starting at 0:00 as well.

However, it may give you an idea where to look for a fix. I'll look into it myself as well, but I am pretty occupied at the moment so I can't look now. Send me a reminder if you think I am taking too long and you can't fix it yourself easily....

Cheers,

Imar

richardson167 · February 22nd, 2007, 03:51 AM

Imar,

Thanks for the re-assurance that its not just me on this one. I'll try & find the problem although I'm new to ASP so you or someone else on this forum may well find it first.

Cheers,

Lawrence.

Imar · February 24th, 2007, 08:55 AM

Hi Lawrence,

I looked into the code and found the problem. The stored procedure sprocAppointmentCheckAvailability looks at the start and end date to determine whether a specific booking object is available or not. It also looks at the end and start date of the appointment, and when both have different dates, the appointment is assumed to cross midnight. (Look in the comments in the procedure and you'll see what I mean). However, when you start an appointment at 23:00 hour which lasts and hour, the end date is *at the next day*. E.g.:

Start: 3/11/2007 11:00:00 PM
End: 3/12/2007 12:00:00 AM

This in turn causes all kinds of problems in the procedure.

One way to fix it is to subtract one second from the end date, bringing it back on the current day. This is the revised code for the wizAppointment_FinishButtonClick method in CreateAppointment.aspx:

Code:

If ValidateAllSteps() Then
  ' All steps valid. Create a new Appointment, check if it can be made and then finalize it.
  wizAppointment.Visible = False

  Dim myAppointment As New Appointment()
  myAppointment.StartDate = _
       calStartDate.SelectedDate.AddHours(hpTime.SelectedHour)
  myAppointment.EndDate = _
      myAppointment.StartDate.AddHours(Convert.ToInt32( _
          lstDuration.SelectedValue)).AddSeconds(-1)
myAppointment.BookingObjectId = _
      Convert.ToInt32(lstBookingObject.SelectedValue)
  myAppointment.Comments = _
      Server.HtmlEncode(txtComments.Text)

I haven't tested this extensively, so you may run into problems where other appointments appear not to overlap where in reality they do. If you experience problems like that, you may be able to do the same trick in the stored procedure, but only temporarily to a temp variable.

Hope this helps,

Imar
---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
Everyone is unique, except for me.
Author of ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results and Beginning Dreamweaver MX / MX 2004
While typing this post, I was listening to: Praise You by Fatboy Slim (From the album: You've Come a Long Way, Baby) What's This?

richardson167 · February 26th, 2007, 04:39 AM

Imar,

Thanks for looking into this one, I had been looking myself and found that I couldn't book the last appointment of any given day, even if it wasn't the 23:00 slot, so I modified the CheckAvailability stored procedure as shown:

from:

DATEPART(hh, @endDate) <= DATEPART(hh, BookingObject.EndTime)

to:

DATEPART(hh, @endDate) <= (DATEPART(hh, BookingObject.EndTime)+1)

This seemed to work. I will try your fix also and see how I get on.

Thanks again,

Lawrence.

Imar · February 26th, 2007, 07:00 AM

You're welcome....

Imar