Recipe 3. Conference Room Scheduler

Although it may seem that you spend all your life online interacting with others digitally through email or perhaps teleconferencing, face-to-face meetings in any organization are still a fact of life. Offices have a limited supply of conference rooms in which to hold these meetings, and thus the need for a conference room scheduling application was born. Any scheduling application must take special notice of time as well as space. When a meeting is scheduled and how long it is to last are just as important as the location and dimensions of the room.

Our Conference Room Scheduler recipe is very user-oriented. The administrator has only two special pages: one for making new rooms available on the system and the other for editing those room descriptions. All other aspects of the application are designed around the user's needs. Typically, the user would begin by attempting to schedule a meeting. If a meeting is already set for the chosen time or place, the user is informed of the conflict and then given an opportunity to try again or search the already-scheduled meetings to look for an available slot. After a meeting has been established, the user is able to update or delete the record.

This recipe focuses largely on date and time functionality. Data sources store time and date values in special formats and, depending on the server model, require special handling to read and save related values. Not only are specific times, such as starting times, incorporated, but durations of meetings are also calculated. Such calculations included in this recipe have many uses in various other intranet and workgroup applications.