Hello and thank for reading. Problems with lending library

1) Does not allow a person to book more than 1 equipment e.g. A laptop + projector? Or does it?

2) Does not allow pre-booking like weeks ahead (Post#279923 by Fenton Jones in this forum resolves this, I think)

3) Does not allow you to cancel a booking.

Background info:

We are a small department of a university. We have some equipment that students and outsiders hire from us. Students are not charged but outsiders pay a fee (don’t need to record how much they pay etc as another system looks after this). The equipments are hired for Workshops, Seminars, Public Lectures, Conference, Student-Presentations and Tutorials. The students, lectures and others DO NOT take the equipments home.

When a student or staff book an equipment we record

1) Name

2) Student ID/Staff ID

3) Room #

4) Course Name

5) Time e.g 1-2pm

Room #, Course Name and Time are recorded so our technicians can set-up the equipments for the students in that particular room at that time

Typical data we have for a day:

10-11am LCD + Laptop (equipment), Rajneel (name) s11031452 (student ID), 093-203 (room #), MG103 (course #)

10-11 LCD+Laptop, Apakul, S11030544, S113, MA206

11-12 OHP etc etc

…

.

.

.4-7pm LCD + Laptop (Name of lecturer). (Lecturer ID), 021-120, Room #, Course #

The booking can come through email, phone or in-person.

Reports

We want to track

- Number of bookings by students and staff in total per month/year

- How many times an equipment is booked over a month/year

- Total duration i.e. usage of an equipment e.g. HP Laptop Serial #55-TT-44 – 500 hours used in 2007

- Other reports that might be useful

I am not entirely a beginner in database development so if you could provide some hints as how to solve my problem using the lending library would be more than appreciated.

The university wants to close our department as they think we are not doing anything so if I am able to develop this database, we could provide them with all the details etc.

Thank you for reading and your help.

Regards,

X

I presume you are talking about the Lending Library template that comes with the application? I am not familiar with it (or any other FMI template), so I can't say if it fits your needs - but basically what you are describing is an invoicing solution. The only difference is that the customer (student/staff) books the "products", instead of buying them. So the core structure you need would be:

Bookings -< BookingItems >- Equipment

This would enable you to book several items in a single booking, just like selling multiple products in a single invoice.

You might also want to add a table for "customers", if you want to track them and their stats (otherwise you might just enter their details directly into the booking record).

Thank you Michael.

Yes I am talking about the Lending Library template that comes with the application.

This Lending Library already comes with 3 tables (Assets, Contacts and History)

As you are saying "Bookings -< BookingItems >- Equipment"

Equipment is Assets. Customer is Contacts. I am pretty sure Bookings is History.

So I need another table "HistoryItems"?

History -< HistoryItems >- Assets?

I am attaching the default relationship that comes with the lending library.

Thank you.

So I need another table "HistoryItems"?

History -< HistoryItems >- Assets?

That seems correct. But there's no way you're going to drag me into discussing that template… :P

Hi Yog, did you have any luck solving this?

We are in a similar boat and want to use filemaker to run our small loan department.

K.