Building a Conference Room Scheduling Solution with good UX?

Hey there!

My boss hit me up and asked if AppSheet was an appropriate solution for booking conference rooms at our company HQ.

The basic idea is that there will be a tablet in front of each conference room displaying todayโ€™s bookings. You can then add your own booking for the day (or log into the app and schedule a booking for next week or whatever).

I found a sample app for this application but they had hard-coded every half hour block into their data table and had users sign up to โ€œownโ€ those blocks. It does solve the problemโ€ฆ but we have two conference rooms and 10 โ€œguest officesโ€, so that would be twelve spaces times sixteen blocks for, what, like 330 days every year? 192 rows per day, 63,000ish per year?

Is that actually the optimal way to handle something like this? Not only does that seem cumbersome to set up, if someone needs a 3 hour meeting, they have to have six โ€œinteractionsโ€ to book out that amount of time. (Also, the sample app is a couple years old I think, so are there new AppSheet features that might go well with this project?)

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Obviously I donโ€™t want you to do my work for me, but if you have any insights on whether is this is truly the right way to approach this problem, Iโ€™m all ears!

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I think you could probably just write a valid_if expression to prevent the same room from being scheduled for the same date and time periods. Check out the โ€œoverlapping time periodโ€ section of the AND() article:

as well as existing solutions for preventing duplicates:
https://community.appsheet.com/search?q=prevent%20duplicate

And maybe even take a look at this for some crazier ideas more in line with the sample app, and less so about what I just said above.

Haha that calendar hack is bananas. There are so many mad geniuses in the AppSheet community.

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