Hi

i wonder if anyone can help me...

I'm looking for a booking calendar year planner which can be used with filemaker pro

i run a small holiday property business

There are  30 properties and the  objective of the business is to ensure each property receives holiday bookings.

To show the bookings for each property I have been using a year planner onto which i can show how many bookings each property has and which dates are involved for each booking

The year planner  software i used to achieve this i was actually part of the basic software which was included with the old psion 5mx handheld pda  - it's incredible that such an old piece of kit had such a useful piece of software on it - it was actually part of the agenda software on the scion

obviously i have to upgrade this rather old-fashioned system  as the Psion handhelds are no longer  avaialbe and i need to create on my pc, using filemaker pro , booking calendars for each and every property

In terms of the appearance of the year planner what is important is that the arrival and departure dates for each booking (those simple date fields will already have been filled in ) become automatically  displayed on the year planner as an "occupied" period for example as a red  highlighted sections showing that the property is occupied for those dates.

The other requirement is that if i click or hover on that red occupied section i can see the info   telling me which client is booked into that property and for how long - again this is data i will already have entered in other fields...

This particular feature is commonly available on some of the major rentals websites on the Internet for example home away holiday lettings so the ability to define an arrival and departure date and then  have the database automatically convert that to a visual on a year planner certainly exists my problem is i need it to exist in the environment of filemaker!!!

So, my questions is ...can anyone  tell me if they are aware of a year planner which would be able to satisfy my requirements? Or is there a FMP dev developer out there who would be interested in creating this plugin?

It definitely would not be a plugin.

 

SeedCode.com has a Calendar that you can implement, and there is a free one here: fmeasycalendar.com

Welcome,

 

you may want to look at http://www.seedcode.com/complete-filemaker-template/ this solution.

 

its not a matter of a "plugin" as you need supporting solution to manage the data and business logic.

Many thanks to both of you for such prompt responses. I'll take a look at the suggested examples. 

Hi 

Thanks again for those links - I'll take a close look at them.  
 

I'm breaking the project down into smaller chunks. 

With that in mind, can I ask, would anyone know if there was a script which might help in the following task:

- Two of the fields in the database relate to the booking dates for each holiday property. These fields are:
 

a) start date of booking  
( end date of booking. 
 

Might there be a script which would enable me to "find" all properties which are booked (for any time at all)  between a given 'start' and 'finish' date (and therefore, by way of doing an 'omit' find, would also show the properties which are AVAILABLE between those same dates). Note: The search would need to throw up properties which, although their bookings might have started before the 'start' date of our 'find' criteria, have a 'finish' date which falls inside the range of our search criteria.

Many thanks.

sure, something like

 

on booking layout

enter find mode

set field start date booking >= given start date

set field end date booking <= given end date

perform find

although their bookings might have started before the 'start' date of our 'find' criteria, have a 'finish' date which falls inside the range of our search criteria.

 

If you want to find all bookings that have at least one day in common with the search range, try

# on Bookings layout
Enter Find Mode
Set Field [ Bookings::startDate ; "<=" & givenEndDate ]
Set Field [ Bookings::endDate ; ">=" & givenStartDate ]
Perform Find

Not sure what you mean by “properties”, though; a Find returns found records.

Hi Wim thanks for your reply - I'd already done what you suggested but that doesnt cope with properties (i run a holiday property rental business) which have a start date before my 'find' date range  BUT a finish date somewhere within the find' date range.  Is EOS's posting (under yours)  suggesting a different solution to yours? Wim - do you have any more thoughts on it?

 

Hi EOS  - many thanks for your reply I'll experiment and see how i get on.  Forgive my relative ignorance but what do the / symbols / notation  mean ..... EG 

 

Set Field [ Bookings::startDate ; "<=" & givenEndDate ]       (Yes I'm a REAL novice!!!) 

 

Just to recap :

What I'm trying to do is perform an 'omit records' find so that , for any given date range i can see which properties are AVAILABLE i.e. which houses have no days booked at all in common with the date range specified in the 'find'

 

 

  THANKS GUYS  - IT's REALLY APPRECIATED