Recurring Events in Calendar - Rails

Question

I am searching for the best way to model recurring events. I am using fullcalendar to display events. But I guess recurring events are best handled on the rails backend.

Answer 1

Just an opinion off the top of my head, perhaps comenters will point out a problem I'm not thinking of at the moment:

I would make a RecurringEvent model (or whatever you want to call it) that has_many :events.

Let's say each event is created by an employee (based on your notes), then RecurringEvent would also belong_to :employee. You could then build a has_many :through relationship where an employee has many events and has many recurring events.

The RecurringEvent model could have a start date and a pattern, and it could initially use this pattern to create the individual occuring events. Then on any event that is part of the recurring series you could modify or delete that individual occurance, but you could also 'regenerate the series', deleting all events in the series (or all future events in the series) and rebuilding them based on a new pattern, so for instance move the meeting from "every tuesday" to "every thursday".

One other kind of nice thing about this is you could create an at-a-glance list of recurring events, which might give you some nice insight into people's major obligations.

Like I said, off the top of my head that's how I would approach it, but this is just an idea and I haven't built anything like that so I don't know if there are any big gotchas in the approach I'm suggesting.

Good luck, please post what you end up doing!