Booking and scheduling are two crucial operations of online services provided by various organizations (hospitals, hotels, beauty salons, etc). They set a foundation for effective time management and well-coordinated workflows. While booking streamlines the process of securing appointments (e.g., reserving a doctor’s appointment), scheduling ensures that the organization’s resources (employees) are used effectively to tackle the workload. That is why these functionalities are demanded in web apps used by such organizations.
Today, we are excited to present a new React-based Doctor Appointment demo. It vividly demonstrates how to combine scheduling and booking functionalities into a single app with DHTMLX, while React ensures its strong and reliable foundation. In this blog post, we’ll explore the main functional and architectural peculiarities of this demo project and the role of DHTMLX Scheduler and Booking in it.
User Interface Sections
The fast and responsive UI of our online Doctor Appointment Scheduling app comes with dynamic theme switching and 3 main sections – Authorization (Login), Client mode, and Manager mode. Authorization determines what type of user (client or manager) logs into the system and what actions are permitted for them. DHTMLX components come into play in Client and Manager modes, delivering an intuitive experience for both types of end-users. Now, we’ll review all three sections of our demo app in more detail.
Authorization (Login)
The correct behavior of our Doctor Appointment app implies a secure, role-based access to data and features. In other words, any user has to log in as a client (patient) or a manager to get access to the corresponding part of the app. This essential division of roles is achieved with the authorization feature. In real-world scenarios, authorization helps prevent the exposure of sensitive data and unauthorized actions.
Client Mode
Clinic mode provides a range of actions commonly expected by patients when booking and managing appointments at medical facilities online:
- Book an appointment by using the capabilities of the DHTMLX Booking widget, such as searching for a medical specialist (by name or area of expertise), specifying a suitable date and time for a visit, and adding personal info.
- Review all upcoming and past appointments via the Scheduler’s Agenda and Month views.
Manager Mode
Manager mode offers administrators and clinical staff a powerful set of instruments for keeping everything on track, from clients’ appointments to the staff schedule and the clinic’s work. Here is the list of available options:
- Dashboard provides a summary of the current working day, including information on appointments, patients, and staff schedule.
- Appointment management allows looking through clients’ current appointments using a mini-calendar, filters, and popular views (Day, Week, Month) of our JavaScript Scheduler. Admins can create a new appointment via the lightbox, drag-and-drop, or the “New Appointment” button.
- Employee Scheduler serves to arrange and review the work schedules of doctors in the Scheduler’s Timeline and Month views.
- Clinic Settings give an opportunity to specify general settings for the whole facility (opening hours, holidays, appointment duration, etc.).
As you can see, DHTMLX Scheduler and Booking enrich our Doctor Appointment app with advanced worktime scheduling and effective booking management capabilities.
Now, it is time to focus on the underlying architecture of this demo and reveal the technology stack that fuels the functional diversity of this project.
Demo’s Architecture
From a technical standpoint, we kept things modern but straightforward. On the frontend, we opted for React, as it is highly demanded, flexible, and performant. Our framework-agnostic Scheduler and Booking components fit in smoothly into React-based projects.
On the backend side, we decided to use a reliable and well-known option, namely Node.js with Express. For data storage, we leaned on the PostgreSQL database. Also, we added the Sequelize tool for convenient interaction with the database.
And finally, the whole demo app is packed into containers (dockerized), making it easier to use for developers in their own environments.
Our new demo app is a ready-made example of how complex scheduling and booking functionalities can be integrated into modern apps with DHTMLX. Therefore, developers can explore how it all works in our demo and use it as a starting point for their own scheduling and booking scenarios.