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BarberFlow

BarberFlow is a web application for managing and booking appointments at a barber shop. It supports two authenticated roles (Admin and Barber) and a public, login-free flow that lets clients self-book appointments.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Tech Stack
• Project Structure
• Prerequisites
• Getting Started
• Configuration
• Seed Data
• Running the Application
• Testing
• Roles and Permissions
• License
• Contributing

Features

• Public, login-free booking flow: pick a service, pick a barber, pick an available time slot, and confirm with name/email/phone.
• Availability engine that validates a slot against the barber's working hours, prevents overlapping bookings, and uses a transactional lock per barber to prevent double bookings under concurrent requests.
• Admin management of barbers, services, working hours, and clients.
• Appointment management (create, edit, cancel, delete) with role-based restrictions.
• Weekly calendar view.
• Role-aware dashboard showing today's and upcoming appointments, scoped to the signed-in barber or shop-wide for admins.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Runtime	.NET 9
Web framework	ASP.NET Core MVC (Razor views and controllers)
Data access	Entity Framework Core 9
Database	SQL Server (LocalDB in development)
Authentication	ASP.NET Core Identity
Frontend	Bootstrap, jQuery, jQuery Validation (vendored under wwwroot/lib, no npm build step)
Testing	xUnit, EF Core InMemory provider, coverlet

Project Structure

The solution BarberFlow.sln contains two projects:

Project	Purpose
BarberFlow.Web	The ASP.NET Core MVC application
BarberFlow.Web.Tests	xUnit test project covering the appointment availability logic

Inside BarberFlow.Web:

Folder	Purpose
Controllers/	MVC controllers: accounts, appointments, barbers, working hours, public booking, calendar, clients, home, services
Data/	BarberFlowDbContext, EF Core migrations seed data, and runtime seeders (SeedData.cs, IdentitySeeder.cs, AppointmentSeeder.cs)
Extensions/	Helper extensions, including claims-based role/ownership checks
Migrations/	EF Core migrations and model snapshot
Models/	View models and Models/Entities/ domain entities (Appointment, Barber, Client, Service, ApplicationUser, etc.)
Services/	Business logic, including AppointmentAvailabilityService (working hours, overlap checks, slot generation, transactional booking)
Views/	Razor views organized per controller, plus shared layout partials
wwwroot/	Static assets: CSS, JS, and vendored frontend libraries

Prerequisites

• .NET 9 SDK
• SQL Server LocalDB (installed with Visual Studio) or a reachable SQL Server instance
• The EF Core CLI tool, if not already installed:

  dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef
  

Getting Started

dotnet restore
dotnet user-secrets set "IdentitySeed:Password" "<your-dev-password>" --project BarberFlow.Web
dotnet run --project BarberFlow.Web

Pending EF Core migrations are applied automatically on startup (db.Database.Migrate()), so a manual dotnet ef database update is not required for the first run.

To manage migrations manually:

dotnet ef migrations add <Name> --project BarberFlow.Web
dotnet ef database update --project BarberFlow.Web

Configuration

appsettings.json holds non-sensitive defaults (logging, allowed hosts). appsettings.Development.json adds the local connection string:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "BarberFlowDbConnection": "Server=(localdb)\\mssqllocaldb;Database=BarberFlowDb;Trusted_Connection=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=true"
  }
}

No secrets are stored in either file. The seed admin password is read from the configuration key IdentitySeed:Password, which is expected to be provided through .NET User Secrets in development (see the command above) or through a secure configuration provider in other environments. If the key is not set outside of Development, identity seeding is skipped.

Seed Data

On startup, the application seeds:

• Services and barbers (Data/SeedData.cs) — a small catalog of services and two example barbers with working hours, baked into the EF Core migrations.
• Identity accounts (Data/IdentitySeeder.cs) — the Admin and Barber roles, an admin account, and one login per seeded barber. This only runs when IdentitySeed:Password is configured.
• Demo clients and appointments (Data/AppointmentSeeder.cs) — sample clients and appointments around the current date, useful for exercising the dashboard and calendar views. This only runs when the relevant tables are empty.

Running the Application

Properties/launchSettings.json defines two profiles:

Profile	URL
http	http://localhost:5050
https	https://localhost:7251 (and http://localhost:5050)

Both default to the Development environment and open a browser automatically.

Testing

dotnet test

BarberFlow.Web.Tests exercises AppointmentAvailabilityService against the EF Core InMemory provider, covering working-hours validation, overlap detection, slot generation, and booking logic.

Roles and Permissions

Capability	Anonymous	Barber	Admin
Book an appointment (public flow)	Yes	Yes	Yes
View own dashboard and appointments	No	Yes	Yes (shop-wide)
View/manage clients	No	View only	Full CRUD
Manage barbers, services, working hours	No	No	Full CRUD
Delete appointments	No	No	Yes

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contributing

This is a personal project under active development. There is no formal contribution process at this time.