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Blocking off next year - Can't

Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:27 pm
by russellhltn
It's rapidly approaching calendar planing time. I wanted to "reserve" the entire stake center as "blocked" for all of 2013 to give the building scheduler first crack at setting up the calendar.

But I can't.

I can't even block off a whole month. I've tried a single event that spans the days, or a single-day event that repeats for a month. All I get is one round of the spinner and I'm still on the same page - and the reservation hasn't been made.

Anyone found a magic formula for this?

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:16 pm
by dshep2020
We do this via reservations. Do a daily recurring all day event with the resource being "blocked". Daily because we can remove a particular reservation if needed.

I recall we tried to do weekly and the were issues with it. Daily solved the problem.

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:24 pm
by russellhltn
That's what I was trying to do. Reservation: Stake Center: Blocked : Entire Facility: One day (1 Jan 2013), Repeating, Daily, Every 1 Day, Until 1 Jan 2014.

No go.

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:37 pm
by russellhltn
I've discovered the problem. I can't lay a reservation overtop of a conflicting event. I believe we had asked to receive a message in that situation, but there is no message. The reservation simply doesn't "take".

I see this as a major bug. We used to be able to reserve overtop of events. A message would be nice, but this is worse. In fact I think it renders "reservation" nearly useless for it's intended purpose. There's already events on the 2013 calendar. Short of deleting them all, I can't schedule the "ward nights".

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 4:39 pm
by dshep2020
My bad, I ran into this same issue and had to work around it. Link I agree that this is a major bug as there is zero feedback that there is a conflict. I had to hunt for the conflict. I also agree that reservations should not be encumbered by an existing reservation. Hopefully this can be address soon.

Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2012 4:53 pm
by jdlessley
dshepher wrote:I also agree that reservations should not be encumbered by an existing reservation.
Just for clarity for others reading this thread the second reservation referred to in this quoted statement is actually a booked event. We do not want to start confusing events with reservations as they accomplish two different things.

Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2012 9:33 pm
by dshep2020
Sorry. Your are correct. Didnt mean to cause any additional confusion.

Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 10:59 am
by kyleq
I've gone through some testing with this issue in our test environment and can see the same problem you've described in that a new blocking reservation cannot be created over the top of an existing event. The fact that no warning is given is a clear indicator this is a bug and we'll get it fixed. However how to fix it I think needs a bit of discussion.

It seems the intention of blocking a location is to make sure no new events for that location are created during the process of scheduling the next year's calendar. Is it a concern then that any building scheduler for that location can schedule the events? What if a ward conducts their planning in a similar fashion? Does this create issues that become too complicated to resolve easily?

The second question is if you'd like to see an info box show up after successful creation of a reservation that warns of pre-existing events/reservations? I'm thinking this would appear above the Reservations calendar in a similar format to the conflict message in that it allows you to see the events and some of their details. Would this be helpful or even useful? The alternative is to simply allow the creation of the reservation and not prompt or warn about other events/reservations.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this issue before we decide to schedule it for fixing.

Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 11:40 am
by russellhltn
kyleq wrote:Is it a concern then that any building scheduler for that location can schedule the events?
Not for us. The idea behind "blocked" was to allow the building scheduler "first crack" at scheduling. Later we'd modify the reservation to open it for the stake and then the wards.

kyleq wrote:The second question is if you'd like to see an info box show up after successful creation of a reservation that warns of pre-existing events/reservations?
Yes. But it needs to gracefully handle multiple conflicts. (Perhaps just say "there's a bunch of them".) If there's a ton, we're probably aware of it. It's the few we need to know about it.

Suggestion: For repeating events, only mention it once - not once for every scheduled event. I don't need to see 25 "conflicts" for a single bi-weekly event.

Edit: I don't think we can overlay another reservation - only events.