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Booking Calendar

The booking calendar is the main scheduling view used to inspect availability, understand conflicts, and create bookings for marketplace or club offerings. It is designed to behave like a modern calendar application while still enforcing the hub's booking rules.

What the calendar is for

Use the calendar to:

  • switch between Month, Week, and Day views
  • move backward and forward through time
  • view your own bookings on the calendar
  • view that offering's bookings and green availability overlay when focusing on a specific offering
  • create either a single continuous booking or a recurring daily series
  • inspect booking details by selecting a calendar entry

Layout overview

The scheduling page has two main areas:

  1. A left-side Layers card that controls which booking sources are visible.
  2. The main calendar area on the right.

Above the calendar there is also a timezone toggle:

  • Local shows dates and times using your browser's local timezone
  • UTC shows the same booking data in UTC

Changing this toggle affects how dates and times are displayed in the calendar and booking dialog. The hub still stores and sends booking times in UTC.

Layers and what you can see

The Layers card lets you choose which booking sources are visible in passive view:

  • Marketplace Bookings
  • one checkbox per club you are a member of

When you are passively browsing the calendar, the UI shows bookings relevant to your current account context.

When you focus on one specific offering to make a booking, the calendar changes behavior:

  • it shows that offering's bookings for the visible date range (unrelated layers are hidden unless you switch back to All or passive layers)
  • it overlays availability windows for that offering as transparent green blocks (see Availability overlay)
  • it may show anonymous busy blocks for the same offering or for shared-device conflicts on another offering using the same radio—you see busy time, not who booked it (see Conflict visibility)
  • the hub still enforces all rules at submit time, including conflicts that appeared after the calendar loaded

For club offerings, active club members can see callsign or username visibility where the booking policy allows it.

Month, week, and day views

Month view

Month view is best for scanning which dates already contain bookings or blocked time.

Use it when you want to:

  • spot busy days quickly
  • see which dates already have activity
  • jump to a target week or day before booking

Entries are rendered as all-day style rows in month view so busy dates are easy to spot.

Week view

Week view is best for planning an actual booking window.

It shows:

  • a time-based calendar grid
  • 24-hour time labels
  • overlapping bookings side-by-side where possible
  • 15-minute or server-defined booking grid boundaries

Week view is usually the best view for comparing nearby openings across several days.

Day view

Day view is best when you need precise timing.

It is useful for:

  • checking exact free time on one date
  • comparing overlapping or adjacent bookings
  • picking a start and end time with minimal clutter

The calendar scrolls to daytime hours by default, but you can still scroll earlier or later as needed.

Booking colors and visual meaning

The calendar uses color to distinguish your own bookings from other visible booking rows (exact shades are app-defined and may change slightly with theme updates):

  • Your bookings (as the booker) are shown in a strong blue
  • Bookings you can see on the same offering (for example, as the offer owner) use a distinct warm / orange-tinted style
  • Other people's bookings in passive all-layers view use a neutral gray
  • Availability in focused mode is a light transparent green overlay (not a solid booking block; see the next section)

Availability overlay (focused offering)

When you select one offering in the Offerings list (not All), the calendar is in focused mode. In that mode, the app draws the offering's declared available time windows as transparent green regions in the week or day time grid. That is bookable time by policy, not an existing booking.

How it works (high level):

  • Availability comes from the offering's available_times rules on the hub. The client expands those rules into background-style events for the current calendar range.
  • The green blocks are intentionally minimal: they have no time label and no title so they do not look like another booking row. They are a tint you can read through, separate from the solid blocks used for real bookings.
  • Past time is hidden: any part of a window that has already ended is not shown. If a window started earlier today but still extends into the future, only the remaining segment (from now onward) is shown.
  • react-big-calendar treats these as background events, but the component still styles them with a green tint (the app does not use the older blue availability color in this view) so "free to book" is visually distinct from "already booked" blocks.
  • In All / passive mode, the calendar does not paint this green overlay; you see booking blocks from the selected layers only.

How to create a booking

You can create a booking by selecting an empty time range on the calendar.

If you are already focused on an offering:

  • the booking dialog opens for that offering directly

If you are in passive view:

  • the booking dialog opens and asks which eligible non-marketplace offering to use

The booking dialog lets you choose between two booking modes:

  • Block booking
  • Recurring daily

Block booking

Block booking creates one continuous booking from the chosen start date and time to the chosen end date and time.

Use this when:

  • you need one uninterrupted session
  • the booking may span more than one day

Examples:

  • one two-hour booking on a single afternoon
  • one booking that starts one evening and ends the next morning

Recurring daily booking

Recurring daily creates one separate booking per day between the selected start and end dates.

Each daily booking uses:

  • the same daily start time
  • the same daily end time

Use this when:

  • you want the same daily slot repeated across several days
  • you do not want one continuous multi-day block

This mode creates individual daily bookings, not one continuous booking and not an infinite recurring series.

Time rules the UI respects

The calendar and booking dialog follow the hub's 15-minute (quarter-hour) grid in UTC:

  • Start times snap backward to the grid
  • End times snap forward to the grid
  • new bookings require an end time in the future
  • the week/day grid and dialog time pickers use the same step the hub publishes (currently 15 minutes)

Conflict visibility and booking prevention

The calendar is designed to surface conflicts before you submit, but it follows the hub's privacy rules for who booked a slot.

When you focus on an offering, the calendar can show:

  • Your bookings and, where policy allows, identity for same-offer rows (for example, the offer owner may see the booker's callsign; club members may see other members on club offerings)
  • Anonymous busy time for slots blocked by another booking on the same offering or by a shared-device conflict on another offering using the same radio—you see that the time is busy, not who reserved it
  • The green availability overlay for bookable-by-policy time (see Availability overlay)

The hub always enforces conflicts at submit time, even if a block was not drawn on the calendar yet. Submission is rejected when:

  • the same offering is already booked for that time
  • another booking on a shared device conflicts with the requested window
  • the booking falls outside the offering's configured available time windows
  • the offering is disabled
  • the booking would exceed the offering's maximum booking duration (when configured)
  • a paid offering requires booking credits and your wallet balance is not sufficient (free $0 offerings do not require a positive balance to book)

Guaranteed time vs auto-extend

Scheduling reserves a specific window on the calendar. Auto-extend only adds 15-minute blocks at session end when rules allow—it does not override someone else's adjacent reservation. See Auto-extend.

Booking details and popups

Selecting a visible booking opens detail information for that row.

Depending on your role and the offering type, the UI may show:

  • your own booking identity
  • the booker's callsign or username for club-visible cases
  • anonymous busy-state information when identity should stay hidden

Focused scheduling versus passive browsing

The calendar has two practical modes:

Passive browsing

Use passive mode when you want to browse upcoming bookings across enabled layers.

In passive mode:

  • the calendar shows booking rows relevant to the selected layers
  • you can still select an empty slot and start a booking
  • the dialog asks which eligible offering should be used if one is not already focused

Focused scheduling

Use focused mode when you are booking one specific offering.

In focused mode:

  • the calendar shows that offering's bookings, anonymous busy blocks (same offer or shared device), and the green availability overlay
  • this is the best mode for booking that offering within its published windows and seeing whether the next block is already taken
  • if auto-extend is on during a live session, an adjacent reservation at your session end will block extension even when the toggle stays green—schedule the full window you need when conflicts matter
  • Paid offerings require sufficient booking credits before the hub accepts a new booking or extension.
  • Free ($0) offerings can be booked without a positive credit balance; settlement still runs with a zero charge.
  • If the offering owner set a maximum booking duration (for example 90 minutes), your start/end selection cannot exceed that span in one booking. Booking the full maximum leaves no room for auto-extend at the end of the session.
  • The hub fetches bookings using the visible calendar range plus a forward-looking window for responsiveness.
  • The calendar updates when relevant booking changes are pushed from the hub.
  • Busy-time visibility follows the Booking Policy and privacy rules rather than exposing every user's identity.
  • An active scheduled session can extend past its original end when auto-extend is enabled and hub rules allow—see Auto-extend. If you book the offering's full maximum duration (for example a 90-minute slot on a 90-minute max offer), auto-extend cannot add time at the end.
  • On Operating → Stations, a booking whose window is still active may show Connect again if the radio path dropped but the booking row is still valid—the booking itself is unchanged until cancel, settle, or end-of-window rules apply.

Authoritative rules: Booking Policy.