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.

   

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

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

   

   

Result

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