Allow double booking

[jberanek]

[Transferred from the general mailing list]

We would like to use MRBS for another purpose other than booking rooms. Is there a way to allow double/multiple bookings?

Reported by: campbell-m

Original Ticket: mrbs/support-requests/1343

[jberanek]

If you want to allow double/multiple bookings, then a general calendar application would probably be more suitable than MRBS. MRBS is specifically designed for situations where multiple bookings aren't allowed.

Could you give an example usage so that we can understand the requirement more?

Original comment by: campbell-m

[jberanek]

What we are trying to develope is an online visitors access request with approval process by categories administrators. I have tried with google apps (forms & calenders) but unfortunately category admins thought it's too many steps to approve a request. MRBS was an laternative and it seemed simple to use with nice approval process but the problem is that we will have sitiuations where multiple people will request access at the same dat & time.

Thank you for reply.

Original comment by: mabdelhady

[jberanek]

Is there a limit to the number of visitors you can take? If so, then MRBS could be a solution. For example, if you can take a maximum of 20 visitors then you could set up 20 'rooms', each one of which would represent a visit.

Original comment by: campbell-m

[jberanek]

We have several shared offices w/ multiple desks, so we actually changed the vocab such that you're reserving a "Desk" (what MRBS calls a room) in an "Office" (what MRBS calls an area). Works well.

-Josh

Original comment by: alecs4000

[jberanek]

Thank you Campbell, I was just expermenting with this. Will see if it will work.

Original comment by: mabdelhady

[jberanek]

I'm working on this now. Thank you Josh.

Original comment by: mabdelhady

[jberanek]

Just a note on Double Booking. I am looking into this as we have instances where two or three different courses are all being taught the same lesson in the same room at the same time. I want to display a list of rooms booked for the day to EACH COURSE so they see a list of rooms to attend during the day. A double booking feature would solve this for me.

Original comment by: *anonymous

[jberanek]

Another way of doing this could be to create a custom field for the course, which could be a select drop-down allowing multiple selections. The room would then be booked out to the lesson and the appropriate courses selected.

I'm not sure off-hand whether custom fields allow multiple selections, but if not then this would be an easier enhancement and more logical.

Original comment by: campbell-m

[jberanek]

I managed to do this in the old version installation and honestly can't remember how I did it! Is there a way to allow multiple bookings at the same time in the new version? Thanks

Original comment by: mabdelhady

[jberanek]

There isn't a way to allow multiple bookings in the new version because MRBS is designed for exclusive bookings. You probably used one of the solutions suggested in the thread above.

Original comment by: campbell-m

[jberanek]

I din't use any other solutions other than MRBS. Can you just please guide me where the condition of trigerring the doulble warning is? on which page?

Thanks

Original comment by: *anonymous

[jberanek]

The other solutions I meant were the ways of using MRBS to do what you want, eg having multiple rooms. But if you want to disable the restriction on double booking then the you need to modify the function mrbsCheckFree() in mrbs_sql.inc and make it always return null. However there's no guarantee that multiple bookings will be displayed properly in the calendar views.

Original comment by: campbell-m