campbell-m
commented
1 year ago Interesting. I agree that the all rooms week and month views don't work well for a small number of rooms and it would be useful to have a better way of displaying them. I think the question is what's the best way?
Using colours and variable widths depending on how many other rooms are booked at the same time is what Outlook does for multiple calendars in overlay mode (together with tabs to highlight the calendar of interest). But having the bookings of variable width prevents you scanning down a column to see when there's a free slot. And using colours for rooms means that you can't differentiate types - unless there's some other styling that could be used for rooms or types.
Other ideas that occur to me are:
- Subdividing the day columns into rooms. This might work for the week view, but I don't think it would work for the month view, unless you allowed scrolling.
- Having a table for each room, one above the other (or beside the other).
- Having a table for each room, all in the same x-y space but in different z-index planes and tabbed. The selected tab would be displayed normally and the other tabs would be displayed faintly. I'm not sure whether this might get messy for lots of overlapping bookings. Maybe the text is only displayed for the tab in focus, and for the other tabs there's just a coloured slot. This solution again suffers from the problem that it's reusing colours for rooms, so maybe that issue needs to be solved somehow. Another issue is that at the moment opacity is used to style, for example, tentative bookings.
Another thing to take into consideration is what happens on a small screen, eg a smartphone?
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The weekly and Monthly views, when showing all rooms, do not show much detail and it is difficult to quickly see timings etc. of bookings. I understand if you have a lot of rooms to be booked that the views you have developed are useful, but if you only have 2 or 3 rooms it would be nice to show the same level of detail you see when only 1 room is selected to view.
Describe the solution you'd like If the system has a small number of rooms then show all the rooms on the weekly and monthly views in the same way the system works if you only have one room visible, e.g.
Where there are 2 rooms (coloured Red and Green) and where both rooms have bookings at the same time, they appear side by side. I understand that for more than 2 or 3 rooms it could get messy!!!
Describe alternatives you've considered I have tried using the "Internal/External" feature to mimic having 2 rooms, i.e main hall is "Internal" and Upper Hall is "External" but then I can't have a booking for the Upper and Main Halls at the same time.
Additional context I know a bit about PHP programming and I'm happy to have a go myself, but would appreciate some help as to where to start and any advice on the changes required.
Thanks
Alan