Jan 23, 2018
In most instances the school rooms and resources will be booked using the standard timetable periods. There are however instances when the booking of a resource benefits from using standard time-based schedule, ie booking specific hours or half-hourly slots.
Configuring a time-based booking schedule
Time-based booking schedules can only be configured for categories, they can’t be applied to individual resources. This is because the resource that would normally be bookable using this time-based schedule is probably grouped with other similar resources that would also use a time-based schedule. For example is the school had a number of vehicles that were bookable in hourly slots, the vehicles would all be grouped in a category most likely called ‘Vehicles’, and they would all be bookable using the same time-based schedule.
- Click on the Resources link in the Configuration menu – this will list the categories
- Click the ‘Edit’ link for a category
- Use the ‘Time period’ selection box to select an appropriate time-based schedule (the default is the ‘Period structure’ as defined in your school timetable).
- Click the ‘Save’ button to save this detail
The resources in this category will now be bookable using this time-based schedule. By default the system assumes a starting time of 7am and a finish time of 10pm. These are only defaults and you can easily change them by editing the category record again, this time next to the time-based schedule you will find ‘From’ and ‘To’ values for the time range that will be displayed.
Booking with a time-based schedule
When you make a booking and select a time-based category / resource the standard timetable periods will be replaced by the nominated time-based periods for the defined duration. You can still extend your booking (assuming nobody else has the resource booked) and you can still repeat a booking just as you might for any other resource.
Displaying bookings with a time-based schedule
When you click on ‘My bookings’ you may well have resource bookings for both period-based and time-based resources, in this case the period structure will be displayed (it has preference over the time-based display which is limited to particular categories). The time-based booking will appear in each period block that the time overlaps with.
However, if you display the bookings for a time-based category (or a resource that is in a time-based category), the periods displayed will be the time-based periods as defined for this category.
The same rules apply when including bookings in a report.
Internal representation
As with normal period bookings, internally we store the actual start date/time and end date/time of the booking in the database. This means that if you adjust your periods or adjust the time-based schedule while there are existing bookings, these bookings will not be impacted by your change – the original start and end times remain. This means these bookings may appear to overlap periods and times in the new structure.