Week 2
30 May 2014During the last few days I have finished the basic webservice layer for the surgery entity and extended the api. At the end of the week, I started to develop the scheduling UI. I came across the jquery plugin fullcalendar from Adam Shaw. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer two features that are required for this project:
- resource view: it is not possible to define resources (e.g. operating theaters) that are displayed as columns in the daily view. Open Issue 490
- available times: it is also not possible to define background events that define times when the resource is available Open Issue 496
There exist numerous forks of this project which all extend the functionality in some way. Unfortunately their changes are not integrated into the main project. I filtered out two attempts that seem to be “actively” developed:
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AbleTech fork: It offers a resource view but no available times.
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Elhigu fork: Here it is the other way round - no resources but available times.
I also found a project from Szabó Rudi, offering both features, but it seems that it isn’t actively developed. It is based on the fullcalendar version 1.4.5, while the current release is 1.6.4 - I wasn’t even able to get the sources, because the archive was currupted.
There is already a beta of v2 of the fullcalendar available with many improvements like timezone support, and built-in internationalization. I hope that in the nearer future the resource view as well as available times are integrated in the main project. Till then I will use the Abletech fork, because having a resource view is a lot more important. I will see how to add the available time functionality later.