Booking Scheduler

[TommyF]

I have been asked to design a program for the local sports club to schedule the clubs facilities ie tennis courts, sports hall etc.

I am just not sure of the best way to achieve this. I will be holding the information in a database and just need some help with the scheduling part.

I would be looking for a some sort of calender that would hold the date across the top and the time down the side and then fill bits in with colour when it had been booked. I have looked on the internet for a control as a front end for this but the only ones I have found aren't free.

What would be the best way to do this. I did think about using the calender in Outlook but would rather have something all in VB.

I really want something that looks professional and not just like a grid.
I hope this makes sense

 

[RiverGuy]

If it is for display only, I would probably draw something with GDI+.

Or, you might get a ListView to look OK to make a calendar with.

 

[TommyF]

Thanks for the help RiverGuy.

Just as a thought could I use an Excel spreadsheet and have it on the form rather than excel open as a seperate program?

 

[RiverGuy]

Yes, I believe you can. I think you can use "Internet Office Components" or something like that. I forget the exact name. I haven't used them since a VB6 project a while back. Realize though, that this is going outside of the .Net runtime environment. I'm not sure if the users have to have an Excel license, etc. You might want to check on it.

Of course, a calendar is fairly easy to do. You will always have 7 columns and 5 rows. You can even make your own control, and load an array up of them. When you get to your seventh element, then you make the eighth one right below the first one.

 

[TommyF]

Thanks again, I will look into that.

Thinking about this a bit more could I not use a data grid each line representing 1 day. I could then set some code that when it got to a certain date it would automatically add the next set of dates to the database.

 

[RiverGuy]

You could, sort of. I would think it would be cool for the display to look like an actual calendar.

With a datagrid, you would have 31 rows. There would be a column for date, a column for day of week maybe, a column for booked, etc.

 

[TommyF]

The problem I have is that each day is going to have to be split into hours as well as everything is booked by the hour so I was thinking I could have fileds for the hours and just have the data grid show 7 records at a time represting a week of bookings.

 

[RiverGuy]

Yeah, that would work.

 

[TommyF]

Thanks for all your help. I will go away and try all the ideas and see which one I like the best.

 

[RiverGuy]

Keep in mind that the reason I suggested the ListView originally is because, IMO, it allows easier user interaction with things like context menus and the like.