Adding content to portal

[sirmatter]

I have a working database that uses a Double Booking system provided by the FMForums commenters (attached). My problem is that I need a way to quickly select multiple rooms and apply them to 1 conference. My goal is to use a one click method on either a button or field to add the room to the list. I also need a visual way to determine if a room is booked or not. I have already experimented with conditional formatting and buttons but this seems to not be the best way to make this work. It would also be nice if the item clicked to assign and the conditional formatting were one item.

I already have the system functional using this example but I cannot seem to figure out a way to quickly and effectively add rooms. Some groups use up to 50 rooms at a time. 

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

DoubleBooking.fmp12

[GisMo]

How about a script?

Suppose you need to block off 50 rooms(btw, your example only has 4).

Your script would go something like this

take a Date Range and search for rooms available against those dates and available rooms.//(you could probably include other critera, beds, non-smoking, whatever)
if less than 50 are found(or whatever the required amount is available) notify the user to proceed or cancel
If Proceed, then,
 loop through the available rooms
  create booking records for each room until you've reached the amount needed. 
  apply the same customerID to each booking
  If you need to apply a special price, you would do so at this point as well.
 finish loop
end if

 

If you need a way to visualize the bookings/availability..There are quite a few options out there. What were you envisioning?

[sirmatter]

Hi Gismo,

I already have the double booking system working perfectly with all 50+ rooms. I am envisioning some type of button or repeated field system where a person can see what rooms are available and then click on a room to book it. That would seem to be the easiest way to add more than one room. You would have to click 50 times but that makes the most sense due to the volume of rooms available.

Also, The example above would not work for what I am doing. These are very specific selections that must be made depending on what a customer wants. We need to manually enter these requests as the facility has rooms spreading over 500 acres and many of the buildings are separated by quite a lot of distance. I could have special buttons to select blocks of rooms at a time but these would have to be preset options that would then have to be manually edited if there was a conflict.

P.s. we use to use just a standard check box set and value list. We would then compare each room for each booking timeframe. This took hours of extra work but was the only way we could set it up at the time.

Edited November 12, 2015 by sirmatter

[GisMo]

A script can still be used to find the available rooms. Maybe return a list view of available rooms. Create a "Flag" Field in the Room table. When you do this "availability search", clear all of the flag fields in the found set. Then, the user can scroll through the list of available rooms and use their judgement to select rooms. Use a checkbox to select the flag field for the rooms you want to select(use a value list with only one value: 1). When done selecting all of the rooms you need, run a script to find the rooms with the Flag Field with a value of 1 and then create bookings for that found set. Does this sound like a viable solution?

 

Edited November 12, 2015 by GisMo
typo

[sirmatter]

The only problem is that I want the user to be able to see all of the rooms, even if they are booked. There was an Airplane Seating File that was provided to me in the past. It did exactly what I want but I could not figure out how to implement it. It showed all the seats and had a graphic for seats that were booked and seats that were empty. It was based on a repeated field and I could not understand how it worked.

I can still create a script to show which rooms are booked and which rooms are available but I would still need a visual way to determine which rooms meet the criteria. I guess I could still use the portal I am using but I would have to have separate buttons to add these items to the portal. Does this make sense? I am not very advanced in filemaker design.

 

 

 

[Lee Smith]

I merged a couple of your topics because the were on the same need. Please do NOT multiple post your question. I will be sending you  a Private Message in a few minutes.

[GisMo]

4 hours ago, sirmatter said:

The only problem is that I want the user to be able to see all of the rooms, even if they are booked. There was an Airplane Seating File that was provided to me in the past. It did exactly what I want but I could not figure out how to implement it. It showed all the seats and had a graphic for seats that were booked and seats that were empty. It was based on a repeated field and I could not understand how it worked.

I can still create a script to show which rooms are booked and which rooms are available but I would still need a visual way to determine which rooms meet the criteria. I guess I could still use the portal I am using but I would have to have separate buttons to add these items to the portal. Does this make sense? I am not very advanced in filemaker design.

 

 

 

I see...I think you have 3 options in order of simplest to more complex:

1. You still show a list view and use some conditional formatting or some type of calculation for each room to show if it's available or not depending on the date.
2. You do some trickery with some fields/repeating fields and some scripts to show your room availability. Probably create a repeating field with 31 repetitions.
3. Custom Javascript/Web Viewer

 

I've attached a quick and dirty example, using method 2. Let me know if this is what you're thinking about. (Note: I could probably make the SQL queries a bit more efficient, but it's simple enough to show how it's working in the loop)

 

 

Booking.fmp12

 

Booking.fmp12

Edited November 12, 2015 by GisMo
Updated Scripts in sample file for account for last day in search range