Call for Templates: Group Scheduling/Availability

We’ve had some businesses inquire recently about using Glide to coordinate scheduling for large groups.

One use case example is a group of home medical care providers. 100 care providers (i.e. in-home nurses) update their schedule every month to share their availability with a central scheduling office. When the office needs someone on Thursday at 11am, they can see who’s available at this time and not currently assigned, and assign or contact them.

You could create a single app that works for admins and individual nurses who maintain their available times in the app. You could sell this app on our highest price tier — $99 — easily. We are going to introduce higher price tiers in the Template Store soon as well.

5 Likes

Thank you for this. Let me see what I can come up with.

1 Like

Just a q

These nurses I’m assuming are regulated nurses on zero hours contract who have already been pre-screened, verified, and working for the care home in question. The care home just needs to know their availability, being on zero hours contract?

Or

Mass care home carers directory from which care homes hire carers by availability?

I can deliver both.

To start, the apps should only care about availability.

The same app should work for babysitters, construction workers, waiters, etc.

1 Like

Nice. This is doable for sure…problem is booking. If the slots aren’t predetermined, there are glitches aplenty when attempting to book times from a device that uses a different regional date format than the app builder.

Here’s the convo:
Can you test my Meet with Me app?

Meet with Me: A Booking App that Prevents Conflicts

If the app doesn’t require booking times, then it becomes much more doable. Thoughts?

Okay consider it done. I’ll put my work on hold for few days.

Thank you for this.

1 Like

And there in lies the rub. Having one template that could account for any type of scheduling scenario across any region at this point is Uber complex. It might not be done until glide can have some sort of standardized date logic regardless of region or device language. Please see my previous post.

1 Like

I struggle with booking functionality in glide as well. Specifically time blocking to show available time frames and also booking during available or unavailable time frames.

It’s almost like there is some missing functionality that is needed to pull this off.

It would be nice if there was a days of the week functionality or time range functionality to configure time ranges. Then use that as a condition when scheduling.

Glide mentioned something about coming out with their own calendar or timing component to standardize the experience between devices. @david maybe you can incorporate some of these time block functionalities into it.

In this case, all of the users are local in the same city.

We are designing some scheduling components to make this easier.

7 Likes

Okie doke!

Delighted this can’o worms has been opened. Retire faux date/time picker, introduce date validation, conflict detection, robust calculations, and UTC timestamps. I’ve invented my solutions with > 200 columns. Excruciating, but there are ways. Whoever takes this on - I hope the result is flawless considering its use case.

4 Likes

We have a lot of work to do but it’s a very exciting area for Glide to improve!

4 Likes

Hi @David, check out my latest iteration of my WFH Tracker. It now includes the ability for users to enter their regular schedule, override their schedule for a specific day, and see who is working “today” based on a regular schedule that has been entered or by overrides made to regular schedules.

https://sh-worktracker.glideapp.io/

The main purpose of this app is know who is working when and where are they working (at home or on-site). It could easily be updated to reflect the needs you identified.

FYI this hasn’t rolled out and can be played with. It only works with one job per user right now, so if a 2nd job is added, things may get wonky.

Should an employee be able to be assigned more than once per day?

Great news about higher price tiers in the Template Store.

1 Like

@david Can you give us any insight on projected order on this initiative… Specifically, will this functionality be finished prior to App Store integration or is this a feature that’s currently slated for after App Store integration?

Just curious where this falls in line with App Store integration.

@david

Progress! —FYI it’s super complex.

2 Likes

Holy Guacamole. That’s amazing.

What was the most annoying thing about building that app? Or what’s the #1 thing we could improve to make it easier to build?

1 Like

The most annoying thing is that I can’t lookup an arraycolumn from a multiple relation nor can I use the “is included in” for relations—I had to create a series of text join columns from a multiple relation, join THOSE joins with a template column and then use the “is not included in” filter:

That and I have to build my arraycolumns / calendars / calendar checks in the sheet (Glide doesn’t have Weeknum() or Today() formulas, nor can it generate a sequence array column that fills dates between a start/end date—thanks @ThinhDinh!) so there’s a bit of lag.

2 Likes

Still trying to find a way to introduce 0.5 into that lol, but it’s very complex already.

1 Like