Designing a Calendar system like Google Calendar [closed]

Answer 1

I think I understand your second paragraph to mean you are considering a second events table that has a row for each occurrence of an event. I would avoid that.

Re-occurring events should have a start date and a stop date (which could be Null for events that continue every X days "forever") You'll have to decide what kinds of frequency you want to allow -- every X days, the Nth day of each month, every given weekday, etc.

I'd probably tend toward two tables - one for one time events and a second for recurring events. You'll have to query and display the two separately.

If I were going to tackle this (and I'd try as hard as I can to avoid reinventing this wheel) I'd look for open-source libraries or, at the very least, open source projects with Calendars that you can look at. Any recommendations guys?

Answer 2

Darren,

That is how I have designed my events table actually, but when thinking about it, say I have 100K users who have create events, this table will be hit pretty hard, especially if I am going to be sending out emails to remind people of their events (events can be for specific times of the day also!), so I could be polling this table every 15 minutes potentially!

This is why I wanted to create another table that would expand out all the events/re-occuring events, this way I can simple hit that table and get the users months view of events without doing any complicated querying and business logic, AND it will make polling much more effecient also.

The question is, should this secondary table be for the next day or month? What makes more sense? Since the maximum a user can view is a months view, I am leaning towards a table that writes out all the events for a given month.

(ofcourse I will have to maintain this secondary table for any edits the user might make to the original events table).

ChanChan,

I have designed it with the same sort of functionality actually, but I am just referring to how I will go about storing events, specifically how to handle re-occurring events.

Answer 3

As previously stated, don't reinvent the wheel, just enhance it.

Checkout VCalendar, it is open source, and comes in PHP, ASP, and ASP.Net (C#)!

Also you could check out Day Pilot which offers a calendar written in Asp.Net 2.0. They offer a lite version that you could check out, and if it works for you, you could purchase a license.

Update (9/30/09):

Unless of course the wheel is broken! Also, you can put a shiny new coat of paint if you like (ie: make a better UI). But at least try to find some foundation to build off of, since the calendar system can be tricky (with Repeating events), and it's been done thousands of times.

Answer 4

The Ra-Ajax Calendar starter-kit features a sample of handling the RenderDate event which can modify the dates of specifically. Though the "recurring events" is more of an algorithmic thing and here I doubt very few calendars will help you much...