Dears , couple of questions for group booking
Hello,
I'm afraid Scheduler doesn't have these features at the moment. Strictly speaking there are no group slots - it's rather slots for several students into which a group can be booked, but no association to a group is maintained once the slot has been booked.
At the moment, students will always have the choice whether to book for themselves or for a group, and there's no way of preventing two groups to book into the same slot, supposing that the slot has sufficient capacity.
Hi,
how about just adding a column to the slots table which specifies the group/individual status of a slot? This should solve the original poster's problems and also the problems which arise from the fact that you can only drop yourself from a group appointment.
You need the group association for dropping group appointments (to drop a group appointment for every member in a group), this could be implemented by reusing the "Appoint for"-dropdown menu. Basically the user selects which groups appointments to drop with the same dropdown menu and then the appointments are dropped for all members of that group, if the group appointment existed. Or maybe it would be better to add a separate dropdown menu. Are there other cases where that group association would be needed (= would it be more reasonable to add a slot-group association table)? Also it could be more user friendly to hide all slots that are already booked by some group.
I can implement this if it sounds reasonable. I've chosen to use this plugin at my university, however I think that this group appointment problem needs to be solved somehow first. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or advice how to proceed. Should I add tickets to the issue tracker?
Oh, another issue I had. Slot list pagination doesn't seem to work if the user is a student. I have a use case which requires for continous slots around the clock and without pagination the list becomes too big to use.
BR,
Pirkka
Hi Pirkka
As you may have noticed reading this forum, the group scheduling process is a quite complex issue. I agree that this is an area of Scheduler which might use some review in future versions. Some of the questions involved are: Should the booking be for a group, or for the individuals that were in the group at the time of booking? Can individual members of the group drop their own appointment (or that of the group)? Who can make an appointment for the group? Should grades be given on a per-person or per-group level? Should the same scheduler contain both group and individual appointments? These are just some of the questions to which different users may have different answers, and I'd be interested to hear what is actually required out there.
However, the current group scheduling feature has been around in Scheduler - almost unmodified - for 8 years or so, and I guess that a number of users rely on the current functionality as is, so changes have to be done with care.
I'd also expect that any nontrivial changes to group scheduling will trigger quite large-scale changes to the code.
In short, I'm inviting opinions on this point, to find out what requirements and typical usage patterns actually are. But I'm not planning to implement (or integrate) major changes to the group scheduling feature in the short run.
Regarding paging in the student view, this in fact doesn't exist at this time. However, you may want to vote for CONTRIB-5194. (Zero people have voted for it so far.)
Best wishes
Henning
Thank you Pirkka , Henning
I totally understand that making the plugin supports group booking and cover all related areas is complex and huge task.
But why not start with the following ( just brain storming, I am not sure how complex to implement):
In the scheduler setting add an option to force group booking.
if this option is chosen:
I think this will be a good start , which can be enhanced in the future.
regards
wasim
Dear Wasim
thanks for your thoughts - it's good to know what would work for you.
If others have thoughts about this as well, please do add your comments. There's plenty of time to discuss this; the next major release of Scheduler won't be available before May 2015 (at the earliest).
