How to Prevent Overlapping bookings in a Podio Calendar

Posted: 2015-01-23

With a Calendar App, when a meeting Item is added, a previous item for that same date and time may already exist. This could be very problematic.

Solution

Create a flow to check for overlapped bookings and send an alert to the Item Creator to reschedule the new meeting.

First: Add a Podio calculation field to the app to show the just the date in format YYYY-MM-DD. We need this only to search on later.

Next: Build your flow on create of an item in the app:

• If date|start != ""
• AND If date|end != ""
• Create a custom variable for just the date: date("Y-m-d", strtotime( [date-token] ))
• Search in App where above new podio calc field equals above variable (ie find all other items for the same day)
• For each found item
• Sanity Check: ((strtotime([date-token|start])>=strtotime([found-date|start])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])<=strtotime([found-date|end]))) || ((strtotime([date-token|start])<strtotime([found-date|end])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])>=strtotime([found-date|end]))) || ((strtotime([date-token|end])>strtotime([found-date|start])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])<=strtotime([found-date|end])))
• add a comment or something

Basically we're searching for all other items on that date, and then comparing the start and end times to see if they overlap.

Result

A chat message will now be sent to the person in charge of the meeting to reschedule the event.

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by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.

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