Absence and availability

An out-of-office entry is more than a mark on the grid. It is the record the platform reads when something asks whether a person is available, so its dates have to be right.

One record, two readers

An absence is an ordinary event with the out_of_office type and a person attached. Two things read it:

• The Away view, which draws one row per person across a four-week window.
• The platform’s availability logic, which decides whether somebody’s time can be offered.

Both read the same rows, by design. If the view and the availability decision came from separate records, the two would eventually disagree. Somebody could be booked while their leave was still showing on the calendar for everyone to see.

It also means the calendar is not a display copy of a leave system kept somewhere else. In Lunar Paper, the calendar entry is the record.

Why it must cover whole days

An out-of-office event is refused unless it covers whole days. The reason is practical.

The checks that answer whether a person is away match on start and end dates. A timed event stores instants rather than dates, so nothing would match a timed absence. It would appear on the grid while every availability check reported the person as free, and somebody marked away could still be booked.

Refusing the timed shape at save time prevents that. Accepting it and then ignoring it would be worse, because nothing on the calendar would look wrong.

On an upgraded installation a few timed absences may survive from before the rule existed. They stay invisible to availability until somebody edits them to all-day.

Who can record what

Anyone in the service can record their own absence. Recording one for somebody else takes an editor, so colleagues cannot mark each other away.

The person an absence belongs to is the Who is away field, not the author. When an office manager enters leave for a team, the author is the office manager and the subject is the person who is away. Everything downstream follows the subject.

What an absence sets off

Saving an absence does three things beyond drawing a bar:

1. The subject and any attendees are notified.
2. Availability for those days closes, so the person is not offered as bookable.
3. When the absence starts, the platform raises a Team Absence Starts event that automations can act on, such as a handover checklist, a message to a channel, or a reassignment.

Because one entry has all of these consequences, check the dates twice. A leave record that is off by a day gives an availability answer that is off by a day too.

To record one, see Record time off. For what the Away view shows, see the views reference.