Appointments support

[sumnerevans]

As a user I want to define appointment slots where someone can book a meeting with me.

Basics

• Create appointment slot configuration database structure #3482
• Create CRUD REST API for appointment slot configurations #3481
• Provide appointment slots for a given time span via REST API #3477
• Provide REST API to book an appointment slot #3478
• CRUD UI for appointment configurations #3483
• Public appointment configurations overview page #3542
• Public appointment booking page (similar to forms public pages) #3484
• Integrate appointments on the profile page #3541
• Appointments availability #3653

Planned improvements

• Search all principal calendars when checking for the max number of appointments per day #3634
• Check event status for the conflict booking #3637

Design Review Details

Some polishing

• Add icons(event icon) for appointments (left sidebar, calendar view) #3621
• Add "copy link" action to appointment config list items #3605
• Show toast after copying appointments link to clipboard #3723
• Make the name of the appointment not clickable #3625
• Change appointments duration defaults #3628

Edit view:

• Lets try to use a different size of the modal or make it less wide
• Add navigation bar (to be done when we have more element on the modal)
• Move appointments duration "minutes" into the input #3724
• In the future have the save button as sticky
• Add a confirmation to the appointment config modal #3606

• Make availability section collapsible (if we have a component for this) we don't
• Actions menu has tiny space between menu and triangle
• Use working hours as appointment availability default #3694
• Use 9-5 Mo-Fr otherwise
• Use empty input for no daily limit of slots of appointment configs #3691

Overview page:

• Use buttons for appointment configs on the overview page #3623
• Replace arrow with event icon on the appointment overview page #3644
• Improve text on appointment overview page #3642

Booking page(select date, select slot):

• It should start at the first possible date for an appointment (by the config). Despite any booking conflicts. Fix appointments availability handling: start, end and time before next slot #3631
  • Make the days before today not active Fix appointments availability handling: start, end and time before next slot #3631
• Placeholder text for no appointment slots #3725
• Show only the possible days (available days) Fix appointments availability handling: start, end and time before next slot #3631
• Double the avatar size on the appointment booking page #3641
• Improve appointments container padding on the booking page #3726
• The slots should be sticky and we should only scroll them when its too long(low priority)
• Fix jumping timezone on the appointment booking page #3654

When you click a time(hour)

• Appointments time should be in a new line #3667
• Vertically align both columns in the appointment booking modal #3656
• Improve form inputs of appointment booking modal #3657
• Improve wording of the appointment booking modal #3658
• Show confirmation modal after booking an appointment #3668
• Move booking modal date and time to a new line before the description #3686
• Increase booking modal avatar size #3684
• Increase width of booking modal form #3685
• Instead of a confirmation modal on the booking page, replace the whole page with the confirmation view #3688
• Move the button to book appointment slots to the bottom right of the modal #3687

Possible enhancements in the future

• Add guests to appointments #3589
• Clean up appointment configs when the user gets deleted #3604
• Create Notification for Organiser when booking is confirmed / cancelled #3630
• Provide URLs/pages to update or cancel a booking #3479
• Add calendar picker for appointment conflict selection #3722
• Create Talk room for booked appointments #3480

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Original request

Google Calendar for Business has a feature where you can set up "Appointment Slots". It works as follows:

Create an event on a calendar, and select the "Appointment slots" option. You can configure the slots to have a certain duration, or be a single slot. See screenshot:

Then, you can share a link to the calendar where people can book time on your calendar in those appointment slots:

I would like this feature in Nextcloud. I know that the calendar is backed by CalDAV and I have a feeling that this is not an actual feature of CalDav, so it would require some significant changes to the calendar app itself, or possibly not even be part of the calendar app at all?

Is this a feature that would be welcome in the default Nextcloud calendar? If so, I am willing to help implement it (I will need guidance though, I have no familiarity with developing Nextcloud apps).

[georgehrke]

Some possible requirements:

Freebusy and selfbooking module

The idea of this module is to enable my customers to do booking of appointments with me (the operator of the cloud) on their own. For that

• they need to see which are free time slots
• they need to reserve their appointments

To do so, that module has to run on the cloud server and needs to provide two web interfaces:

• configuration interface, where the operator can adjust preferences for the booking
• customer interface, where customers actually do the booking

The result should be a browser interpretable calendar view, which can be integrated to a web page - as well as CalDAV client readable output.

Config interface needs at least these controls:

• display time period x days/weeks/monts back & y days/weeks/months forward in time
• choose display one week / two weeks / one month
• choose days of the week shown
• time slots which form the "office hours" in general A user setting to define office hours for calendar scheduling server#27422
• existing calendars to be summed up to represent the "busy" blocks
• calendar(s) into which customers should insert their desired appointments
• personal data customers have to provide (Name, email, phone #, postal address - obligatory or optional)
• period of time customers are allowed to book (choose multiple of quarters, half, full hours, discrete number of minutes, time limit for an appointment)
• booking raster which should be observed - appointments start every x minutes, every quarter, third, half, full, even or odd hour)
• minimum free time between appointments (can be 0)
• text boxes for customers' comments (yes/no/max characters)
• confirmation by email to customer and operator (yes or no)
• text / image bits, sent within confirmation to customer
  booking ID, required to change/cancel the appointment

User interface therefore needs these entries:

• period of time desired
• personal data according prefs

[jancborchardt]

Here is an example of how Outlook does it on mobile, starting in Mail:

[georgehrke]

Let me repost something from another ticket here so it doesn't get lost:
It's best if we tackle this issue incrementally:

• To allow people to book themselves an appointment, we first need write support for public calendars: Allow editing on publicly shared calendars server#3509
• To only show busy spots and not the actual event names, we need sharing / publishing of calendars as "show busy only": Share calendar to users or groups with "show only as busy". server#11214

Once those two things are implemented, adding slot support will be much easier.

[miaulalala]

So, short explanation of the way the logic currently works:

Appointment Config:

Sets the different parameters, such as name, start time, end time, increment, preparation time etc which will be used to generate slots later.
The RRule allows more sophisticated configuration, such as days of the week etc.

Booking:

1. Slots are defined via an RRule.
2. We generate all possible slots within the constraints set by the RRule.
3. The max amount of bookable slots per week is generated
4. The slots are then intersected with one or more calendars to remove any unavailable times.
   • This should also take into account transparency of a calendar
5. Slots are returned.

Related PRs are nextcloud/server#29188 and nextcloud/server#28970

I'll add more documentation as I go.