Make Hard Blackouts a "hard" validation

[orenyk]

2016/06/16

See below for the original motivation - we want to prevent both valid reservations and requests from being created such that they overlap with Hard Blackouts. I suspect that this can be accomplished through an ActiveRecord-validation, but we'd have to make sure.

Original

Requested by ITG:

We are interested in turning off all future reservations while we reorganize and assess our inventory. I looked under settings but there does not seem to be a clear method of doing so. Would you know how we can turn off reservations?

This was not something we'd previously considered; I suggested creating a hard blackout date to prevent patrons from creating reservations but it's not a great fix since they can still create requests. I'm envisioning the following:

• [ ] general "kill switch" that prevents patrons from doing anything other than browsing the catalog (e.g. effectively guest view mode + their own profile / history)
  • note that existing reservations wouldn't be an issue since checkout persons / admins could still return the equipment
• [ ] setting for whether or not to allow requests at all (it occurred to me that this should be optional)
• [ ] maybe another setting to disable creating any reservations (by any user) - this kinda overlaps with the goal of the first point but they're not exactly identical.

Thoughts? If we can get this into v5.5.6 that would be awesome.

EDIT On second thought we don't need this to go in v5.5.6, let's just bump it to v6.1.0

[esoterik]

Making hard blackouts disable requests and making end dates on blackouts optional could fix this, right? I think the functionality overlaps enough that adding a new setting isn't necessary, plus if old blackouts aren't deleted there's a record of the dates where reservations were disabled.

[orenyk]

I agree, although I think we might still want to add a requests on/off switch (this was requested separately by BMEC a few weeks ago and I forgot to create a new issue). I'm going to make that a separate issue regardless, so we can change this issue to simply making hard blackouts an AR-level validation (like availability), which I believe should prevent requests from overlapping with hard blackouts.

We can try to swing this into v6 later in the summer, I don't think it's that urgent.

[esoterik]

I have this almost completed, but it still brings up the request prompt when the validation fails. Fixing that will be much easier after #1624 is merged because I cleaned up ReservationsController#create and ReservationsController#new, and added a more detailed "Reservation Denied" page.

Blocking on #1624 for now.