Store business hours of a company

Do you really need to store them in a database?

Personally I would add a row for each day to a table. Something like this (and make company/day unique)

id | company_id | day | open_hour | close_hour | closed

In migration

$table->unique(['company_id', 'day']);

Does this need to be stored in a database as you will need to query them each time you want them which is not good for performance?

You could always put this into your config/app.php as an array

   'store.hours' => [
        'Monday' => '9am-5pm',
        'Tuesday' => '9am-5pm',
        'Wednesday' => '9am-5pm',
        'Thursday' => '9am-5pm',
        'Friday' => '9am-5pm',
        'Saturday' => 'Closed',
        'Sunday' => 'Closed',
    ],

then inside your blade template, you could call them and loop over them.

<ul>
    @foreach(Config::get('store.hours') as $day => $hours)
        <li>{{ $day }} - {{ $hours }}</li>
    @endforeach
</ul>

or if you want to access it inside a controller just do the following:

$storeHours = Config::get('store.hours')

If you need them in a database then I recommend the following structure:

"id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
"store_id" integer NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES "stores",
"day" integer NOT NULL,
"open_time" time,
"close_time" time

You don't need an is_closed column because you can just leave the open_time or close_time nullable. and do a statement to check on your blade template.

@foreach($store->hours as $store)

    {{ $store->day }} - {{ !empty($store->hours) ? $store->hours : '' }}

@endforeach

Check out ternary's for more information if you have not worked with them before :) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25284344/ternary-in-laravel-blade

Hey guys thank you for all your responses.

but what I meant is the way I code the form in the view...

do I have to store them in an array ? or seperatly ?

for example

<label> Monday </label>
<input  name="mondayStartTime"> </input>

<label> Tuesday </label>
<input  name="tuesdayStartTime"> </input>


<label> Wedneday </label>
<input  name="wednedayStartTime"> </input>

..etc

or is this possible ?

<label> Monday </label>
<input  name="startTime[0]"> </input>

<label> Tuesday </label>
<input  name="startTime[1]"> </input>


<label> Wedneday </label>
<input  name="startTime[2]"> </input>

..etc

I would use a time picker (https://jdewit.github.io/bootstrap-timepicker/) and then have input naming as mondayStartTime & mondayEndTime then on your controller convert the times and then concatenate them together to store in the database.

From experience, store each open and close time separately in the database. That way you can query easily for stores “open now”, doing things like “closing in 30 minutes”, etc. Make it human readable in the front end, not when you store it. As for naming the inputs, I don’t know... perhaps using the day names makes it a little more explicit, otherwise you can have people looking at your code wonder if 0 is Monday or Sunday. But I think you can feel quite confident if you make it an array with 7x2 entries, that’s not very likely to change.

Spatie created a package for this situation: https://github.com/spatie/opening-hours

Of course they did... :-)