Today I dedicated my efforts to refactoring the shift calendar’s real-time update logic, particularly focusing on ensuring the calendar accurately reflects deletions without requiring page refreshes. This technical improvement significantly enhances the user experience by providing immediate visual feedback when changes occur.
The core issue I addressed was an inconsistency in how the calendar responded to different types of changes. While adding new shifts would immediately appear in the calendar view, deleted shifts would often remain visible until the user manually refreshed the page. This created confusion when managers thought they had removed a shift only to still see it on their screen.
I began by analyzing the event handling architecture that manages calendar updates. I discovered that the problem stemmed from how deletion events were being processed—the system was removing entries from the database but not updating the calendar’s internal data structure. To fix this, I modified the deletion handler to not only remove the shift from the database but also broadcast an event that the calendar could listen for and respond to appropriately.
This required creating a new custom event type specifically for shift deletions that carries the unique identifier of the deleted shift. I then enhanced the calendar component to listen for these events and update its visual representation accordingly. The implementation was tricky because FullCalendar (the library we use for calendar rendering) has specific requirements for how events are managed within its ecosystem.
A particularly challenging aspect was handling batch deletions, where multiple shifts might be removed simultaneously. The original approach sent individual update notifications for each deletion, which caused performance issues when many shifts were deleted at once. I optimized this by implementing a batched notification system that consolidates multiple deletions into a single update event, significantly improving performance during mass schedule changes.
I also took this opportunity to refine how the calendar handles failed deletions due to permission issues or network errors. Previously, such failures would leave the UI in an inconsistent state where the shift appeared to be deleted visually but still existed in the database. My enhancement adds proper error handling that reverts the visual change if the actual deletion fails, keeping the UI and database in sync even when problems occur.
To validate these improvements, I developed a comprehensive testing protocol that simulated various deletion scenarios: single shifts, multiple shifts, shifts with special statuses, and deletions performed by users with different permission levels. This thorough testing confirmed that the calendar now correctly and immediately reflects all types of changes, providing users with a consistent, reliable experience.
This refactoring may seem like a subtle change, but it addresses one of the most frequently reported usability issues with our shift management system. Managers can now confidently make scheduling changes and immediately see the results of their actions without questioning whether the system has actually processed their requests.