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Appointment Calendar Views

The appointments calendar is where you see who is booked into your reading rooms and when. Open it from the navigation when you want a visual overview of the day's (or week's, or month's) bookings — to check how busy a room is before approving a walk-in, to find an open slot, or to pull up a specific researcher's appointment so you can sign them in.

The calendar shows the appointments for one reading room at a time by default, with five ways to look at the same data: Day, Week, Month, Timeline, and Agenda. You pick the view that fits the task — Day and Timeline for "what's happening right now," Week and Month for planning ahead, Agenda for a clean printable list. Switching views never changes the underlying appointments; it just changes how they're drawn.

This page covers the views themselves and the controls around them. Creating, editing, cancelling, and confirming appointments each have their own pages.

When you'll use this
  • A researcher arrives and you need to find their appointment to sign them in — open the calendar in Day or Agenda view for today.
  • You're planning staffing for next week — switch to Week or Month view to see the spread of bookings.
  • You want to compare rooms — use the Custom room selector to overlay several reading rooms at once, or the Timeline view to see every room as a row.
  • A reading room is closed for a holiday or has reduced seating — the calendar shades those periods so you can see them at a glance.

Opening the calendar​

Open the Appointments page from the navigation. The calendar fills the page, with a toolbar across the top and the reading-room selector just beneath it.

The view, date, and reading room you're looking at are all reflected in the browser URL (for example, /appointments?date=2026-06-04&view=week&room=3). That means you can copy the address to send a colleague the exact calendar you're looking at, and the browser Back and Forward buttons move you through the dates and views you've visited.

You need appointment access to open this page

The calendar requires the View level (or higher) of the Appointments permission. If your role has no appointment access, the page won't open. Creating a new appointment additionally requires the Edit level — see the note on the New Appointment button below.

The calendar stays current on its own

You don't have to refresh to see other people's changes. When a coworker creates, edits, confirms, or cancels an appointment in a room you're viewing, the calendar picks it up over Aeon's real-time connection and redraws within a moment — no reload, no losing your place. (Your own changes appear instantly as you make them.)

Choosing a reading room​

A row of reading-room tabs sits below the toolbar — one tab per reading room configured for your site (and, if your Aeon instance has multiple sites, filtered to the sites you currently have in context). Click a tab to show that room's calendar.

  • Reorder the tabs by dragging them. Aeon remembers the order you set, and which room you last looked at, the next time you open the calendar.
  • Overlay several rooms at once with the Custom tab. Click Custom, then check the rooms you want to combine; use Select All / Clear All to toggle everything. The calendar then shows every checked room together, each one drawn in its own color, with a legend so you can tell them apart. This is handy for spotting a researcher who has back-to-back appointments in two different rooms, or for a building-wide view of the day.

On a narrow screen the tab row collapses into a single Select reading rooms button that opens the same room checklist.

No reading rooms?

If your site has no reading rooms configured for appointments, the calendar shows No reading rooms configured instead of tabs. Reading rooms are set up in the Customization Manager.

The toolbar's left side controls when you're looking at:

  • ‹ / › (the left and right chevrons) step backward and forward by one unit of the current view — one day in Day, Timeline, and Agenda views; one week in Week view; one month in Month view.
  • The date label in the center tells you the range you're viewing (for example, Thursday, June 4, 2026 in Day view, Jun 1 – 7, 2026 in Week view, or June 2026 in Month view).
  • Today jumps to the current date.
"Today" switches you to Day view

Clicking Today doesn't just change the date — it also switches the calendar to Day view, so you land on a detailed look at the current day no matter which view you were in. This is the quickest way to get to "what's happening right now."

The five views​

Switch views with the segmented control on the right side of the toolbar. Each button shows an icon, with its name (Day, Week, Month, Timeline, Agenda) appearing alongside on wider screens. The view you choose is remembered for next time.

In every view, clicking an appointment opens its detail panel, which slides in from the right with the full booking — researcher, times, status, associated requests, notes, and history — and the actions available for it. Hovering an appointment shows a quick summary tooltip without opening the panel.

Appointments are color-coded by reading room, and unconfirmed appointments are tinted amber and carry an Unconfirmed badge so they stand out from confirmed ones.

Day view​

A single day laid out as a vertical time grid, with hours running down the side and each appointment drawn as a block at its start time, sized to its length. When you have several rooms selected (via Custom), each room gets its own column side by side.

  • Overlapping bookings in the same room sit next to each other; when too many overlap to show side by side, the extras collapse into a +N more pill you can click to expand.
  • The current time is marked with a red line when you're viewing today.
  • Double-click an empty slot to start a new appointment in that room at that time — the New Appointment dialog opens with the room, date, and start time pre-filled.
tip

Day view (and Timeline) honor each room's appointment time increment from the Customization Manager, drawing finer grid lines for rooms that book in 15- or 30-minute slots.

Week view​

The seven days of the week (Monday through Sunday) shown side by side, each as a scrollable list of that day's appointments in chronological order. Rather than a time grid, each appointment shows its start and end time as text — so a busy day stays readable instead of getting squeezed.

  • Each day's header shows the weekday, the date, and a count of appointments.
  • A day where every selected room is closed reads Closed; a day with no bookings reads No appointments.
  • Click a day's header to jump straight to that day in Day view.

Month view​

A traditional month grid. Each day cell lists up to three appointments; if there are more, the cell shows +N more. Days outside the current month are dimmed, and days where all selected rooms are closed are shaded.

  • Click any day to open it in Day view.
  • Use Month view for the big picture — which weeks are heavily booked, where the gaps are — rather than appointment-by-appointment detail.

Timeline view​

A single day with reading rooms as rows and time of day running across the top. Each appointment is a horizontal bar in its room's row, positioned at its start time and sized by duration. This is the view for answering "is this room slammed at 2 p.m.?" — you can scan every room's load for the day in one glance.

  • Overlapping bookings within a room stack vertically (capped, then collapsing to a +N more pill).
  • The current time shows as a vertical red line when you're viewing today.
  • The time axis stretches to fill the available width and scrolls sideways when the day is long.

Agenda view​

A clean, single-day list — every appointment for the day as a card showing the time, researcher, appointment name, reading room, and associated request count, sorted by start time. With no grid or spatial layout, this is the most readable view for a printed run sheet or a quick scan of the day's roster. When there are no bookings, it reads No appointments scheduled with the date.

Closures and reduced availability​

When a reading room is closed or has reduced seating, the calendar shades those periods so staff don't book into them by accident:

  • Regular closed hours (times outside the room's configured open hours) appear as a hatched grey overlay in Day and Timeline views. In Week and Month views, a day where every selected room is closed is marked Closed / shaded.
  • Exception closures — one-off holidays or special closures set on the reading room — render as a red-tinted hatched band labeled Closed.
  • Reduced-availability exceptions render as an amber-tinted band labeled, for example, Reduced — 4 seats reserved, along with any public note attached to the exception.
Closures show in the web client

Earlier desktop-era guidance noted that reduced-availability exception dates only appeared in the Aeon desktop client. In the web staff client they render directly on the calendar — closed and reduced-availability bands appear in Day and Timeline views, and fully-closed days are marked in Week and Month views.

Closures are a visual aid, not a hard block here

The shading tells you when a room is closed or constrained, but creating or editing appointments from the staff calendar deliberately lets staff make exceptions to a room's open-hours and capacity policies when they need to. The calendar won't stop you from placing a booking in a shaded period — it's there to inform the decision, not prevent it. Make sure staff know each room's policies.

Searching within the calendar​

The Search appointments… box below the toolbar filters the appointments currently loaded for your selected room(s) and date range. Type any part of a researcher's name or username, the appointment name, or the reading-room name, and the calendar narrows to matching bookings in real time. Clear the box to show everything again.

Search is scoped to what's on screen

This search filters the appointments already shown for the current view, room selection, and date range — it isn't a system-wide appointment search. To find an appointment on a different date, navigate to that date first, or open the researcher's record and use their Appointments tab.

Creating an appointment from the calendar​

Click New Appointment in the toolbar to open the create dialog. In Day view you can also double-click an empty time slot to pre-fill the room, date, and start time. After the appointment is created, its detail panel opens automatically.

Creating appointments needs Edit access

The New Appointment button is disabled unless your role has the Edit level of the Appointments permission. With view-only appointment access you can browse every calendar view but can't add bookings. (See Creating and Editing Appointments for the full workflow.)

Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

A couple of things an SME should confirm:

  • Known bug — submitted as #178 (page held In review until it's fixed). The calendar views don't apply the reading-room filter consistently: Day/Week/Timeline scope appointments to the selected/picker rooms (displayRoomIds), but Month and Agenda filter by date only (month-calendar-view.tsx:48, agenda-calendar-view.tsx:26–27). So with the room filter set to "show all" (nothing checked), Month/Agenda display appointments from rooms that aren't in the picker while Day/Week/Timeline hide them — the same booking appears in Month but not Week. This directly contradicts this page's framing that the five views show "the same data" and that "switching views never changes the underlying appointments." Do not publish until #178 is resolved, then re-verify those statements and the per-view sections against the fixed behavior.
  • Live updates — verified, but please sanity-check the wording. Other users' appointment changes DO push to an open calendar: useRealtimeSync (mounted in the workspace layout) invalidates the ["appointments"] query on an Appointment record-update event, so the calendar refetches; self-updates are filtered out. The "stays current on its own" tip reflects this. Confirm the user-facing phrasing matches expectations and that there's no perceptible lag worth caveating.
  • Screenshots needed: (1) the calendar toolbar + reading-room tabs (including the Custom room selector open); (2) one detailed view (Day or Timeline) showing color-coded appointments and a closed/reduced-availability band; (3) Agenda view for the "printable list" example.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications, i.e. the detail a tool like Claude would need to regenerate this page — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.