Podio

How to Prevent Overlapping bookings in a Podio Calendar

With a Calendar App, when a meeting Item is added, a previous item for that same date and time may already exist. This could be very problematic.

Solution

Create a flow to check for overlapped bookings and send an alert to the Item Creator to reschedule the new meeting.

  1. Add a Podio calculation field to the app to show just the date in format YYYY-MM-DD. We need this only to search on later.

    Overlapping Booking Sol

  2. Build your flow on create of an item in the app:

    -  If date|start != ""
    -  AND If date|end != ""
    -  Create a custom variable for just the date: date("Y-m-d", strtotime( [date-token] ))
    -  Search in App where above new podio calc field equals above variable (ie find all other items for the same day)
    -  For each found item
    -  Sanity Check: ((strtotime([date-token|start])>=strtotime([found-date|start])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])<=strtotime([found-date|end]))) || ((strtotime([date-token|start])<strtotime([found-date|end])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])>=strtotime([found-date|end]))) || ((strtotime([date-token|end])>strtotime([found-date|start])) && (strtotime([date-token|end])<=strtotime([found-date|end])))
    -  add a comment or something
    <!--NeedCopy-->
    

    Basically we’re searching for all other items on that date, and then comparing the start and end times to see if they overlap.

    Overlapping Booking Sol

    Overlapping Booking Sol

Result

A chat message will now be sent to the person in charge of the meeting to reschedule the event.

Overlapping Booking Result

How to Prevent Overlapping bookings in a Podio Calendar