Jan 23, 2018

There is a procedure for importing data from BookIt, however it is not designed for repeat use but an ad-hoc process.

Import Steps

1. In the ‘School settings’ page click on the ‘RB’ tab.  Click the ‘Edit’ button and scroll to the bottom, check the option for ‘Import from BookIt’ and then ‘Save’. (You should uncheck any other integrated products – the import may fail if two products are selected at the same time).
2. This will show the “Integrated products” selected (although this is not accurately an integrated product but just a supported import format).
3. Then click the ‘Import/Export’ option in the Configuration menu.  ‘BookIt’ should appear as an import option.  Click the radio button next to ‘BookIt’
4. This will display a number of options you can select from.  Choose those you would like to use, none are required.  Select the CSV import file and click the ‘Import data’ button.
5. The first screen shows the data loaded and then within a second or two should refresh to show unmatched data.
6. Missing dates.. Sobs will only import data to defined school days with timetables defined.  If we don’t have a school day with a timetable (period structure) we won’t know how to import the data. If there are dates in your BookIt data for non-school days you may need to delete these entries and try importing the file again.
7. Missing periods.. the period structure you have defined in Sobs should match up with the periods as exported from BookIt.
8. Missing teacher names..each staff record in Sobs supports one import code, however the BookIt data can be quite random with regard to the data in the ‘User’ column.  Click the ‘Fix’ option to allocate an entry from the BookIt data to a staff record (best to allocate the name that has the most bookings).  We do some ‘sounds-like’ processing to match names so you may find if there are simple spelling errors these may be matched by the system automatically.  You don’t want to use ‘Ignore’ as this will drop these bookings from the import.  The last option is ‘Description’ – this will move the name into the booking description data and make the booking in your name (as the currently logged in person).
9. Missing room names.. you probably need to add rooms / resources for these if they don’t exist.
10. There is a link ‘Refresh display’ on the top right – you can use this to reprocess the data following any changes you have made.  If you leave the page for any reason you will need to upload the CSV file again.  The ‘fixed’ and ‘ignored’ data is remembered but the names moved into the booking description are not remembered and will need to be selected again.
11. Finally when all of the ‘missing information’ has been resolved click the ‘Continue’ link to complete the import of the data.

The format of the CSV file from BookIt

The export format from BookIt should be a CSV with column data that might look like the following: