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