How to handle bookings / appointments in Salesforce?

Question

Can someone recommend me a way of how to handle booking / appointments for a custom object for community users? Essentially, we've got assets that we rent out, and I somehow need to have a booking functionality for renting these assets. Users should be able to book a time/date for when they wish to use this specific assets.

The Calendar itself would be perfect if I could embed that in a lightning component and share it with an entire community - however, it seems very limited in this sense.

Any guidelines / directions I can take?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

We've been doing something similar where we schedule a custom object as a resource using https://fullcalendar.io/ (specifically the Scheduler part in our case).

We have a junction object between our custom object and Contact to represent the appointments, and render these on the calendar using this plugin.
See this answer by Praveen for more information on how to load this plugin and used it in a Lightning Component. You do need some developer skills though.

Edit:
To add calendar items to the calendar, you could try one of the callbacks that fullcalendar provides. We use the select callback to enable drag-and-drop, but you could use others like dayClick as well of course:

select: $A.getCallback(function(start, end, jsEvent, view, resource) {
    // handle your logic to send the data to the server
    helper.handleNewEvent(start, end, resource);
})