What is the difference in Appointment and Event type services?

When you define an Appointment type service, it will be available for booking any time that your location is open, following the rules for availability.

Defining an Event type service does not create any openings until an Event allocation (ServiceAllocation) is created. Once you create an allocation, you will then see openings in your availability.

You can think of Appointment services as using the equipment at a gym, or going to a salon.  If the business is open, and there is a resource available, you can usually book an appointment.  However, with Event type services, you can think of these like a Yoga class at the gym, or Live Music at the local pub.  The gym has Yoga classes (the definition), but until someone allocates the time for a specific class (ServiceAllocation), there's no way to book a slot.

Can I use Event services for regular appointment booking?

You technically could define an allocation to last for several hours (8hr for example) and then book 1 hour duration appointments within that event.  The number of concurrent slots for each hour are then defined by the ServiceAllocation.  So if you want to think of it like that, you could use Events as simple appointments, but with more restrictions as to date ranges.

Things to be careful about when using Event type services:

• Your resources do not appear to get blocked out when using Event type services until the slot is completely full.  IE, the assumption is the resource is teaching a class and can attend to everyone in the allocation. 
• We ignore the resource hours of availability in the case of Event type services.  The assumption being if you're booking a resource with an event, you already know their availability. 
• Available hours behave slightly differently for the service as well.  We recommend that the service have availability of 24 hrs when it's an Event type service, because the availability should be determined by the allocation.  However, if your service availability is less than your allocation availability, it will cut off some of the availability returned.

Disclaimer: using Events for regular appointment bookings has a lot of flexibility, but it was not explicitly designed for this use case. We would caution you before applying them in this way as it is not a use case in our testing suite.

Endpoints

POST​ /setup​/v1​/services

POST​ /setup​/v1​/services​/{id}​/allocations