Until recently, the Open Event Frontend version 2 didn’t have the functionality to display the already scheduled sessions of an event on the sessions scheduler. Displaying the already scheduled sessions is important so that the event organizer can always use the sessions scheduler as a draft and not worry about losing progress or data about scheduled sessions’ timings. Therefore, just like a list of unscheduled sessions was implemented for the scheduler, the provision for displaying scheduled sessions also had to be implemented.

The first step towards implementing this was to fetch the scheduled sessions’ details from Open Event Server. To perform this fetch, an appropriate filter was required. This filter should ideally ask the server to send only those sessions that are “scheduled”. Thus, scheduled sessions need to be defined as sessions which have a non-null value of its starts-at and ends-at fields. Also, few more details are required to be fetched for a clean display of scheduled sessions. First, the sessions’ speaker details should be included so that the speakers’ names can be displayed alongside the sessions. Also, the microlocations’ details need to be included so that each session is displayed according to its microlocation. For example, if a session is to be delivered in a place named ‘Lecture Hall A’, it should appear under the ‘Lecture Hall A’ microlocation column. Therefore, the filter goes as follows:

let scheduledFilterOptions = [
      {
        and: [
          {
            name : 'starts-at',
            op   : 'ne',
            val  : null
          },
          {
            name : 'ends-at',
            op   : 'ne',
            val  : null
          }
        ]
      }
    ];

After fetching the scheduled sessions’ details, they need to be delivered to the fulllcalendar code for displaying on the session scheduler. For that, the sessions need to be converted in a format which can be parsed by the fullcalendar add-on of emberJS. For example, fullcalendar calls microlocations as ‘resources’. Here is the format which fullcalendar understands:

{
        title      : `${session.title} | ${speakerNames.join(', ')}`,
        start      : session.startsAt.format('YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS'),
        end        : session.endsAt.format('YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS'),
        resourceId : session.microlocation.get('id'),
        color      : session.track.get('color'),
        serverId   : session.get('id') // id of the session on BE
}

Once the sessions are in the appropriate format, their data is sent to the fullcalendar template, which renders them on the screen:

This completes the implementation of displaying the scheduled sessions of an event on the Open Event Scheduler.

Resources

• Fullcalendar Events and Scheduling Tutorial by Drifting Ruby
• Blog – How to Implement jQuery Fullcalendar in Laravel – Krissanawat​ Kaewsanmuang