Coda Your Service Hours

Define availability per location

In our journey to build a robust Coda doc, we’ve learned that a simple starting assumption — like a hotel room’s 24/7 availability — doesn’t apply to every product. As we define each item’s unique requirements, we must decide which constraints are essential and which can be left out. A locker, for example, may not require any availability logic, allowing us to build a simpler document without unnecessary tables. But when it comes to products with real-world limitations, such as a bike from a local shop, we need a way to account for nuanced schedules. This brings us to a key constraint: the concept of Service Hours, which formalizes the relationship between a product and the specific, often irregular, times it can be accessed.

Creating Scalable Schedules with Variations

To manage these nuanced schedules efficiently, we borrow an insight from how organizations manage employee working days. Instead of directly defining hours for every location or product, we first create a dedicated table to define a set of unique Service Hour Variations. Each variation represents a common schedule — for example, a “Weekday Standard,” an “Early Close,” or a “Holiday Schedule.” This modular design allows us to define the full logic for a schedule only once.