Category: Development

New Custom “Range” (Slider) Booking Field

2 minute read time · Updated February 14, 2025 · First published June 6, 2017

MIDAS Room Booking & Resource Scheduling systems come with a set of basic booking fields enabled by default. These allow you to record the type of booking, the number of attendees, any resources, and booking notes. That’s in addition of course to the room (venue), date/time, and client details.

Booking fields can be re-ordered as well as made optional or required. They can also be selectively hidden from certain users.

Furthermore, MIDAS gives you even more flexible control by allowing you to add your own “custom” booking fields as well!

A variety of different custom booking field types may be added to MIDAS, including:

Expanding the ‘range’ of custom field types

MIDAS v4.16 expands upon this range with the inclusion of a new “Range” (or “slider”) custom booking field type:

Custom Range/Slider Booking Field
Custom Range (Slider) Booking Field

When adding a new “Range” custom booking field to MIDAS, you’ll be able to configure the minimum and maximum limits of the “slider”. You can also control the number of increments (or “steps”), as well as specify a default value for the slider.

Then when users add or modify bookings, they’ll be able to adjust the slider to the desired value. That value will then be saved along with the booking.

We’re sure that the addition of the new “Range” custom booking field will find a variety of applications within customer’s MIDAS systems.

For example, a “Range” slider could be used to record the desired room temperature for each booking, which your site’s caretaker/facilities manager could use to program heating/cooling/HVAC systems accordingly.

Furthermore, our optional API could even be used to interface MIDAS directly with your building’s environmental control systems – meaning users could set room temperatures directly from within MIDAS itself! – There are so many possibilities!

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.16!

Tags: ,

New Public “Book Online” feature

3 minute read time · Updated February 8, 2025 · First published March 17, 2017

With MIDAS v4.15 just around the corner, we’re offering a “first look” at some of the highlights coming in the next update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
  2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
  3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

New Public Settings
New Public Settings

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!

Tags: ,

Maintain fixed spacing between bookings

2 minute read time · Updated January 6, 2023 · First published March 16, 2017

Work on the next update to our popular web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion. We’re excited to reveal some of the exciting improvements you can look forward to first here on our blog…

Resulting from customer feedback (which we love getting by the way!), we’re introducing new global settings for v4.15 allowing administrators to enforce fixed spacing (or “gaps”) between adjacent bookings.

Maintain Spacing (Gaps) Between Bookings
Enforce a “gap” between adjacent bookings in MIDAS

This can be useful to allow for room setup, breakdown, reset or cleaning periods between adjacent bookings.

Two new settings are available in this regard. The first controls the amount of free time to maintain before each booking. The second, the amount of free time after each booking finished before the next one can commence.

For example, with the booking spacing settings shown in the screenshot about (15 minutes before / 30 minutes after), and a booking taking place between 2pm-3pm;

  • The latest allowed finish time of a booking added earlier in the day would be 1.45pm,
  • The earliest allowed start time of another booking added later on the same date would be 3.30pm.

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!

Tags: ,

New Un-invoiced Bookings Report

1 minute read time · Updated January 6, 2023 · First published March 9, 2017

Work on the latest feature-rich update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion, and so we’re excited to reveal some of these exciting new and improved features first here on our blog…

As you may be aware, MIDAS is capable of generating a wealth of printable reports, graphs, and statistics allowing you to gain valuable insight into the state of your bookings, venues, clients, invoices, and more.

The Invoicing section of this reporting allows you to see which clients or organizations have been invoiced over any given period, how much has been paid, and how much remains outstanding.

For MIDAS v4.15 we’re improving this reporting to also include an “Un-invoiced Bookings Report”. This new report shows a breakdown of the number of bookings each client/organization has over a given period which have so far not been invoiced for. This is a great way to quickly check whether you’re forgotten to invoice a particular client/organization.

New Uninvoiced Bookings Report

You can check out some of the other reports MIDAS can generate to help you gain insight into your facilities at https://mid.as/help/statistics

Tags: , , ,