All Day Events Not Recognized as Blocker

[ryanleesipes]

Describe the bug
I set a few days with all day events and people were still able to book me on those days.

To Reproduce

1. I'm using a Google calendar and set an event to "All Day."
2. Sent my booking link to someone and they booked a slot on that day.

Expected behavior
Days with All-Day events should not be bookable.

[devmount]

Hi Ryan,

I was able to reproduce your issue, but I think it might be more of an unfortunate default / user error here. When adding all day events in a Google calendar, those have a default status value of "free". Free events aren't taken into account when calculating bookable slots. When setting the Google all day event to "busy", the day gets a blocker in Appointment.

Google event status input:

[MelissaAutumn]

Hey @ryanleesipes, when you have some time can you confirm that you've set your events as "Busy"? Thanks!

[ryanleesipes]

That is a very good question @MelissaAutumn - let me check.

[ryanleesipes]

I do believe that is the issue. That is really unfortunate and is bound to cause problems.

Any thoughts on how we could handle this well?

[malini]

hmm, I have two proposals:

• Add this to our zendesk FAQ with instructions as something like Why don't my all-day events block my calendar?
• Can we detect if our user's calendar has an all-day 'free' event? If so, maybe we can add a notification on their dashboard about this issue: You have an all-day event on DATE, but it is marked as 'free'. If you wish to have this day blocked off, you must set it in your calendar. **Click here** to find out how (which would link to the relevant Zendesk FAQ?)

Thoughts?

[ryanleesipes]

I think those are good suggestions. We should do them and then see what feedback we get.

[devmount]

About the second proposal: We're currently using Google's Freebusy API where (@MelissaAutumn please correct me if I'm wrong here) we can't detect if there is a "free event".

[malini]

@ryanleesipes: great!

@rtanglao would you be able to create the FAQ around this, or should we coordinate on this somewhere?

[MelissaAutumn]

Yeah we use the freebusy api to batch google calendar calls, and also so we don't have to look at their actual events. (I like to avoid that where possible.) It's also just way faster, because we can batch a few google calendar calls into one. Woo!

I suggest we add the faq item, have a link to the faq on appointment's website, and maybe show a contextual help notification while setting up a google calendar like: "Note: By default Google Calendar sets all day events as 'Free'. These won't show up in your schedule/availability as blocked time. Please adjust this in Google Calendar."

[devmount]

@MelissaAutumn @malini Are there still things to do on this?