Rails Reservation Calendar plugin
January 11, 2010
Filed under Rails plugin
Tags: calendar, dates, event, plugin, rails, reservation
As Jon mentioned in the last blog posting, we’ve been hard at work on a couple of projects and I am happy to announce the unveiling of our reservation calendar plugin for Ruby on Rails. It can be found here: http://github.com/broughten/reservation_calendar.
An example of what it looks like in our other “secret” project:
This plugin builds on the ideas and HTML generation outlined in http://dev.elevationblog.com/2009/07/23/event-calendar-rails-plugin/ but differs in the underlying model(s) that drive the plugin. The original plugin used one model that had a start and end date on the model in question. This modeling did not allow for breaks between the start and end date. Our new plugin revises this idea and uses two models to hold the data: a parent model that represents a reservation (instead of an event) and a child model that represents one of possibly many, non-contiguous dates for this reservation.
If you want to get up and running quickly, you can check out the test application that we’ve put together http://github.com/broughten/reservation_calendar_test_app to see how all of the moving parts work together.
Mike
High Altitude Hacking 
I’m glad you liked the EventCalendar plugin!
Quick question/observation:
For one of our projects we used the original, as is, to do something similar to what’s described above. We had two models, Event and EventDate, where an event has many event dates. The EventDate model declared has_event_calendar, thus showing each of the dates on the calendar. It worked pretty well. It looks like your plugin formalizes this approach?
I’m hoping the two can fill their own niche, while also sharing common improvements. Thanks, Jeff
Hi Jeff, Thanks for the comment. And thanks for your support. I completely agree that each calendar will appeal to a different audience with different needs.
You’re right that we’re formalizing the approach to using two models and thereby allowing non-contiguous spans of dates per Event (in our case “Reservation” though whoever uses this plugin can name their models whatever they like). I’ve seen some of the improvement requests on your calendar such as wanting long name to span multiple rows, and hope to add some of these to this calendar. However, since we’ve completely refactored the everything to accommodate the new underlying models and testing with RSpec, we won’t really be able to do cross project merging anymore.
Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help you out, and we appreciate any feedback you have.
Thanks,
–Jon
Hey Jon,
This sounds promising!I am thinking of develop a website where in I need to do reservation module for clinic appointment. I thought of building it on top your plugin. But i am facing issues in installing your plugin; git is getting rejected. It bails out throwing:
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Can you help me out here?
Regards,
Sandeep
Hi Sandeep,
Sorry you’re running into trouble. I have two suggestions for you:
1) Make sure you have followed the github instructions for setting up your ssh keys. If you have a mac, the instructions are here: http://help.github.com/mac-key-setup/
2) If this doesn’t work, you could also try downloading the zip/tar file from github by clicking the ‘Download’ button, rename the extracted folder reservation_calendar, and put it in your vendor/plugins directory. Then look at the test app to see how to add the proper models/views/helpers to get it working.
Hope this helps,
–Jon
When Using Rails 3, I get: Could not find generator reservation_calendar
The plugin generators haven’t been upgraded for Rails3 yet. If you’d like you can take a shot at upgrading them and submit a pull request.
Thanks,
Mike
I’m trying to check this out on git, but getting a (totally awesome and beautiful) 404 error.
Help?
Sorry. We discontinued this. I should actually go ahead and take this blog down too.
hey jon,
I’m a fellow (rails) developer living in San Diego and just wanted to get some insight into Global Quiver. I realize that the project is dead but I’m curious about the demand for this type of service in SoCal. perhaps, there is still a useful business model to be made from this.