Jan 23, 2018

Generally when a repeat booking is created the system will automatically remember the bookings and displays a repeat icon on the calendar display.  However, for some schools when their bookings are imported the repeat option is not available and individual bookings are generated.  Sobs can now attempt to identify a group of repeat bookings and flags them as such.

When to create a repeat group

Generally the operation of Sobs is mostly unaffected by bookings being grouped or remaining as independent bookings.  The one main difference however is when you need to globally change a repeat booking or delete a repeat booking.

How does Sobs identify repeat bookings

You begin the process by identifying the first booking in the group you need to create.  Sobs will look for the current timetable plan applying to that day (it’s only valid on school days or days with valid plans).  Once the plan has been identified we can then determine the cycle length (number of days in the timetable – this typically 5 or 10 but is sometimes 7).

We then count forward school days the length of a cycle and then look again for the same booked resource for the same staff member in the same time slots – assuming we find a matching booking we add this to the repeat group and search again for the next cycle day.  This process repeats until there is no matching booking.

Where you can find this function

1. Click on the booking as though you are going to edit the details.
2. With the booking edit form display scroll down to the ‘Repeat’ option.
3. If this function is enabled for you a button will appear next to the repeat check-box called ‘Look for repeats’
4. Click the “Look for repeats” button to create the repeat booking group
5. On success the system will return a message indicating how many bookings were in the repeat group and a button “List repeat”

What you can do once you have a repeat group

At this point you can ‘Cancel’ the form to return to the calendar – the repeat icon will now display next to the booking.

Alternatively you can make the changes you want to make to the booking and click the repeat check-box and the ‘Save’ button to save those changes and replicate those changes across all of the repeats.

Alternatively you can click the “List repeats” button to view the repeat group and optionally the ‘Delete all’ button to delete all of these bookings at once.