A user as a resource

Hmm, at the moment it would not be possible. But - the hooks in 3.x-dev should give you the opportunity to alter the list of resources .. I'll have to change the validation/conflict checking methods (those ignore a couple of need hooks ATM), and then it should definitely be possible. I'll have to look at the views-implementation though, so far this depends on a node-reference-field ...

OTOH you could simply add one node with a user-reference field for each teacher?

--edit: And then you would have to add a view that selects all bookings on a given "user-node" and displays them to the user. Alternatively/Additionally you could use Trigger/Action to automatically inform teachers about bookings in their user-node.

Well, so far there is no real permission setting for bookings (actually there are some permissions, but not fine enough).

You could let each user create/own his own node and thus each user could control his own node. Then you could disable all views and add one view viewing the current users nodes records. It's not perfect but it's a way.

For a real control / permission setting you would need an additional module.

A (minimal) list of hooks in Bookings API 3.x can now be found at http://groups.drupal.org/node/34868

At the moment the table {bookingsapi_schedules} contains all bookings and availabilities (TYPE = 1 -> Booking, 2 = Unavailable, 3 = Available), status contains whether the booking is finalized (see bookingsapi.modules for a list). (See the new conflict checking for a start).

I need such a list myself - but it's non-trivial (at least if done with performance-considerations in mind). IF you have view bookings and many views you can cache the whole lot - add another table and e.g. for each resource and day add a field containing an array (serialized) of available time-slots. Of course you would have to alter this each time a booking is made.

Alternatively select a timeframe (should be bookingsapi_timeframe_survey, though I didn't fix this for 3.x yet) which gives you a list of bookings and availabilities for a given resource, then build a list of available slots out of this.

I don't have a nice solution for this yet. If you can wait some month - I am going to develop one. Otherwise you are on your own - sorry.

Actually it's trivial to search (either for all resources or for a single resource) wether said resource is available at any given time (e.g. if your bookings always span for two hours, its trivial to tell whether any resource can be booked at 1800 on Wednesday the 32th).

And of course it's possible to build a list of available times:

1. For unavailable resources select a list of available times, otherwise simply take the whole day / time period
2. Select all unavailabilities and bookings and remove them from the list of available times

Now we have a list of available times for ONE resource - repeat this for every other resource (can of course be done in one step, but thats beside the point). (You can use bookingsapi_timeframe_survey and build some kind of inverse of it). And of course you could take your approach and select all times with no booking.

If you want to fetch this information only seldom - that's not a problem. But: This kind of access is a resource-hugger, so it's problematic as soon as you start doing this more often and/or for longer periods of time. So in that case you would have to cache the results and rebuild the cache if the bookings are changed.

So its not a problem in itself, but performance considerations are hard to get by.

I am actually working on a table bookings_cache_free which will hold a list of available time-slots .. It's untested, but committed.

Yes, its feasible ;)

But: Why would you need to create an additional table with user bookings? You could save the uid as note/name for the booking or the client and use the normal booking table.

When do you need your module? 3.x would make this much easier (e.g. more and better hooks in Bookings API).