I've recently adopted a project with an Employee model that needs to contain the person's available hours as an attribute.
The existing form uses 168 checkboxes to represent each hour in the week, and stores the information as seven 24 bit binary strings in the database, each bit acting as a boolean true or false for its corresponding hour in that day.
I'd really like to transition to something a little more elegant and manageable, but I haven't been able to come up with any simple solutions that match the existing implementation's flexibility.
Storing time periods as start and end times can be just as tedious to input when there can be multiple per day, and would likely make querying for availability at a particular time more complicated.
Is there a best practice for dealing with this type of information, both in the user interface and the database structure?