Building the Scheduler UI

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/building-the-scheduler-ui }

If you hadn’t already noticed, Open Event has got a shiny new feature. A graphical and an Interactive scheduler to organize sessions into their respective rooms and timings.

As you can see in the above screenshot, we have a timeline on the left. And a lot of session boxes to it’s right. All the boxes are re-sizable and drag-drop-able. The columns represent the different rooms (a.k.a micro-locations). The sessions can be dropped into their respective rooms. Above the timeline, is a toolbar that controls the date. The timeline can be changed for each date by clicking on the respective date button.

The Clear overlaps button would automatically check the timeline and remove any sessions that are overlapping each other. The Removed sessions will be moved to the unscheduled sessions pane at the left.

The Add new micro-location button can be used to instantly add a new room. A modal dialog would open and the micro-location will be instantly added to the timeline once saved.

The Export as iCal allows the organizer to export all the sessions of that event in the popular iCalendar format which can then be imported into various calendar applications.

The Export as PNG saves the entire timeline as a PNG image file. Which can then be printed by the organizers or circulated via other means if necessary.

Core Dependencies

The scheduler makes use of some javascript libraries for the implementation of most of the core functionality

  • Interact.js – For drag-and-drop and resizing
  • Lodash – For array/object manipulations and object cloning
  • jQuery – For DOM Manipulation
  • Moment.js – For date time parsing and calculation
  • Swagger JS – For communicating with our API that is documented according to the swagger specs.
Retrieving data via the API

The swagger js client is used to obtain the sessions data using the API. The client is asynchronously initialized on page load. The client can be accessed from anywhere using the javascript function initializeSwaggerClient.

The swagger initialization function accepts a callback which is called if the client is initialized. If the client is not initialized, the callback is called after that.

var swaggerConfigUrl = window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host + "/api/v2/swagger.json";  
window.swagger_loaded = false;  
function initializeSwaggerClient(callback) {  
    if (!window.swagger_loaded) {
        window.api = new SwaggerClient({
            url: swaggerConfigUrl,
            success: function () {
                window.swagger_loaded = true;
                if (callback) {
                    callback();
                }

            }
        });
    } else {
        if (callback) {
            callback();
        }
    }
}

For getting all the sessions of an event, we can do,

initializeSwaggerClient(function () {  
    api.sessions.get_session_list({event_id: eventId}, function (sessionData) {
        var sessions = sessionData.obj;  // Here we have an array of session objects
    });
});

In a similar fashion, all the micro-locations of an event can also be loaded.

Processing the sessions and micro-locations

Each session object is looped through, it’s start time and end time are parsed into moment objects, duration is calculated, and it’s distance from the top in the timeline is calculated in pixels. The new object with additional information, is stored in an in-memory data store, with the date of the event as key, for use in the timeline.

The time configuration is specified in a separate time object.

var time = {  
    start: {
        hours: 0,
        minutes: 0
    },
    end: {
        hours: 23,
        minutes: 59
    },
    unit: {
        minutes: 15,
        pixels: 48,
        count: 0
    },
    format: "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss"
};

The smallest unit of measurement is 15 minutes and 48px === 15 minutes in the timeline.

Each day of the event is stored in a separate array in the form of Do MMMM YYYY(eg. 2nd May 2013).

The array of micro-location objects is sorted alphabetically by the room name.

Displaying sessions and micro-locations on the timeline

According to the day selected, the sessions for that day are displayed on the timeline. Based on their time, the distance of the session div from the top of the timeline is calculated in pixels and the session box is positioned absolutely. The height of the session in pixels is calculated from it’s duration and set.

For pixels-minutes conversion, the following are used.

/**
 * Convert minutes to pixels based on the time unit configuration
 * @param {number} minutes The minutes that need to be converted to pixels
 * @returns {number} The pixels
 */
function minutesToPixels(minutes) {  
    minutes = Math.abs(minutes);
    return (minutes / time.unit.minutes) * time.unit.pixels;
}

/**
 * Convert pixels to minutes based on the time unit configuration
 * @param {number} pixels The pixels that need to be converted to minutes
 * @returns {number} The minutes
 */
function pixelsToMinutes(pixels) {  
    pixels = Math.abs(pixels);
    return (pixels / time.unit.pixels) * time.unit.minutes;
}
Adding interactivity to the session elements

Interact.js is used to provide interactive capabilities such as drag-drop and resizing.

To know how to use Interact.js, you can checkout some previous blog posts on the same, Interact.js + drag-drop and Interact.js + resizing.

Updating the session information in database on every change

We have to update the session information in database whenever it is moved or resized. Every time a session is moved or resized, a jQuery event is triggered on $(document) along with the session object as the payload.

We listen to this event, and make an API request with the new session object to update the session information in the database.


The scheduler UI is more complex than said in this blog post. To know more about it, you can checkout the scheduler’s javascript code atapp/static/js/admin/event/scheduler.js.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.