MetaLocator allows you to import a specially formatted field that is interpreted as a location's hours of operation.  

MetaLocator includes a system hours field which can be updated on a per-location basis:

Hours can be provided in the following format within your import file:

Hours can also be provided in the following format

This information can also be provided as a single hours column as show below

This hours data is provided in the following format:

An example of this compact format is as follows:

This example indicates that this location's hours of operation are:

For all formats:

When a location takes service by appointment only, the value can be provided as follows:

By Appointment Only designates the location is available by appointment only for the entire day, similar to Closed.

When a location has multiple open ranges to include, for example, a brief closure for lunch, additional ranges can be specified as shown below. The ranges are separated by a comma and should be provided in chronological order.

During bulk import, multiple hours ranges can be specified as above, or as repeated weekday columns as shown below:

To provide special hours for certain holidays, MetaLocator supports hours for specific days, or specific days of every year.  For example, we support holiday hours that appear every year as shown below:

The above will show the location as open from 6 am to 7:30 pm on December 31st (New Year's Eve) every year, regardless of the day of week it falls upon.  Holiday hours will always override the regular weekday hours. A more complete example might be as shown below:

The above example includes normal weekday hours and also indicates that the location is closed every year for New Year's Eve and this year will also be closed on Halloween (10-31).  Since the hours specification includes the year, this same location would not show as closed on 10-31-2020.  This allows our users to specify holiday hours once and not require updates every year for recurring holidays.

The Interface Builder can be used to add Hours display to your locator. Click Results, then expand the List group then click Add Field, choose Hours from the list of fields. The hours field has a series of Templates that control how it is displayed. The example below shows the "Collapse" template, which shows a summary of the location's hours today, (or next time open if closed) and current status, but also allows the user to expand and collapse to show the full location hours. Change the template to choose from other display options. Users with Pro and higher plans can access the template editor to completely customize location hours display.

The locationstatus field indicates the location's current "open" or "closed" status. When within 1 hour of closing, the system displays "closing soon". The open or closed status is based on the end user's local time zone as compared to the location's time zone. It will interpret the hours as local to the location, and the time as local to the user's browser.

The time zone is automatically populated during the geocoding process. If latitude and longitude are manually imported, the time zone should also be imported in the time_zone field. Valid values are maintained by the IANA.

MetaLocator provides a standard hours field, but sometimes users require multiple hours per location. A common example is a location with lobby hours and drive-through hours which may vary. In this case, create a second field for "drive-through" hours under Data > Fields > New

This custom field will appear in the Custom Fields tab for manual editing.

To import multiple hours fields in the same data feed, the compact format must be used as shown below:

Time display formats are controlled automatically by the user's browser locale. This allows automatic logic to control the use of 24-hour clocks (E.g. 17:00 hours, v.s. 5:00 p.m.), RTL-displays and handles other time display nuances.

There are two modes for time display, Automatic and Manual. The default is Automatic. In automatic mode, you can control whether the system displays minutes or not. This is helpful when you want locale-specific displays but want to conserve space by hiding the minutes.

In manual time formatting the format is fixed, but follows a formatting string that allows very specific control over how time is displayed, shown as g:i a below. That corresponds to a time format as 9:00 am and is the default format.

If you want to provide alternative labelling or translations for the the weekday column headings, import your content using constants, such as

{LOCATOR_MON|9:00-13:00}{LOCATOR_TUE|15:00-16:15}{LOCATOR_WED|15:00-16:15}{LOCATOR_SAT|C} 

Then provide translations in the appropriate language file for LOCATOR_MON  and similar constants.

To translate "Open" and "Closed", provide translations  for LOCATOR_OPEN  and LOCATOR_CLOSED .  To provide a translation for the "Closed" label used in the weekday column, use LOCATOR_HOURS_CLOSED .

The language constant displayed for 24 hours locations is LOCATOR_HOURS_ALL_DAY

The dash between the open and closing hours is controlled by LOCATOR_HOURS_DELIMITER.

Language Constants for By Appointment Only are as follows: