MIDAS includes a number of useful booking and client fields out-of-the-box. You can use these to capture information about your clients and their bookings. In addition, the software also allows you to create custom fields to record additional information with each booking or client.

For MIDAS v4.37, we’re making improvements to a couple of the ‘custom’ fields you can add to your scheduling system.

Custom “Text Area” fields can have a height set and can be resizable

Sometimes a single-line input field may not be sufficient to capture the amount of information you desire. In such instances, MIDAS allows you to alternatively create a multi-line “Text Area” input field.

Until now, creating a custom Text Area field would display a text input field with a relatively small height. Whilst its contents would be scrollable, the field would typically only show 2-3 lines of text at a time.

Now when creating (or editing) a custom Text Area field, you’ll have more control! You’ll be able to specify the number of rows that should be displayed at any given time on the field.

So if you anticipate that your custom field is only going to hold a couple of lines of text, you can set the number of rows to display low. But, if you expect your custom field to capture dozens of lines of text, you can increase the number of rows shown.

Furthermore, you can also set a custom Text Area field to be “Resizable”. When a Text Area field is set as resizable, a user will be able to drag the bottom of the custom Text Area field down to allow the display of more lines of text at once.

Custom file uploads can be set to either view or save/download the file when clicked

The custom “File Upload” field was first introduced in MIDAS v4.07. If utilized, this allows a document or file to be uploaded and attached to a booking or client record.

When we implemented this custom field type in 2014, we configured MIDAS to ‘hint’ to an end-users user’s browser that an uploaded and attached file should be ‘downloaded’ to the user’s device when clicked.

In those days, it wasn’t common place for web browsers to be able to open a variety of file types. There was even a time when browsers would struggle to open and correctly display PDF files.

These days, web browsers can open and display a wide range of document/file types.

For v4.37, we’ve provided administrators with the option to allow MIDAS to ‘hint’ to user’s browsers whether an custom file upload should be either ‘downloaded’ to the user’s device when clicked, or ‘opened/displayed’ in a new window/tab instead.

So if you’re attaching PDF files to bookings, for instance, you can now instruct browsers to display these files in your browser instead of prompting you to download them to your device.

Please note that MIDAS only provides ‘hints’ to user’s browsers as to whether to view or download an attached file. It’s down to individual browsers as to whether they respect these hints and how they process the attached files.

MIDAS ships with a set of standard booking and client input fields. These input fields allow you to capture specific details about a client and their bookings.

Now some of these fields will always be required. For bookings, a minimum of a date and a venue (room/bookable space) is required. All other booking fields can be set to be optional. Likewise, for clients, a minimum of the client’s name is required. All other client fields can be set to be optional.

Here’s a list of the standard fields which are included in MIDAS by default:

Default Booking Fields	Default Client Fields
Date	Client
Times (Booking)	Organization
Times (Setup / Breakdown)	E-mail Address
Venue	Mailing Address
Client / Organization	Telephone Number
Attendees	Fax Number (until MIDAS v4.35)
Booking Type	Cell/Mobile Number
Booking Notes	Client Notes
Resources

MIDAS also allows you to “turn off” fields that you don’t need. So if you don’t need to capture a client’s mailing address, you can disable that field.

But that’s not all – in addition to the standard “default” fields, you can create additional custom booking or client fields in MIDAS.

Adding Custom Fields

A range of different types of custom fields can be created, including:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field.
• File – Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to bookings or client records (self-hosted systems only)
• List (Single Select) – A drop-down list of pre-defined items from which a single item may be selected.
• List (Multi Select) – A drop-down list of pre-defined items from which multiple items may be selected.
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input.
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range.
• Text – A single-line text field.
• Text Area – A multi-line text field.
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource.

As with standard fields, custom fields can also be set to be “required”. This means that an input is required in the custom field each time it’s shown.

New Validation Feature

For MIDAS v4.34, we’re extending the capabilities of marking custom number, text, text area, and URL fields “required”.

Let’s take the example of a custom single-line text field. Marking this as a required field would ensure that a user would enter something into the field. However, MIDAS wouldn’t check what they’d actually entered. Just entering a single character, or gibberish would be enough to allow you to proceed.

From v4.34 onwards, when setting a custom number, text, text area, and URL field as “required”, you can instruct MIDAS what values are considered “valid” for the field. A user would then need to enter a “valid” value in order to proceed.

A Simple Example

As an example, you could make it so that a user has to enter the word “YES” into a custom text field in order to proceed. If the custom field doesn’t contain the word “YES”, the user will be prompted to correct their entry:

The Power Of REGEX

Regular Expressions (REGEX) can be used to create more complex validations for your custom fields too. We’ll cover REGEX in more depth in a future article. In the meantime, as a brief introduction, here are a few simple yet useful REGEX’s for validating entries into your custom fields:

Description	REGEX
Value must start with the letters “BOOK”	^BOOK
Value must end with the letters “ING”	ING$
Value must contain “BOOKING”	BOOKING
Value must be exactly “BOOKING”	^BOOKING$
Value must contain a number (digit)	\d
Value must not contain a number (digit)	\D
Value must be exactly “BOOK”, followed by two single digit numbers	^BOOK\d\d$

You’ll find further examples together with detailed explanations in our KB article: How to use Regular Expressions for custom input validation.

How To Use

Custom field validation can be setup via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields.

On any custom number, text, text area, or URL fields, right-click (or long press on touch screens) on the field’s “Required” box.

You’ll then be able to set or modify the Regular Expression that should be used to validate entries to the field.

The new decade has gotten off to an unusually windy and wet start here in the UK. We’ve taken a bit of a battering from Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis in quick succession. It’s not been very nice weather to go out in at all! So instead, we’ve been spending a lot of time indoors working away at the next update to our MIDAS web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

Our first update in 2020 includes a host of new and improved features, which we’re going to give you a look at in the coming blog posts.

In this post we’re going to cover the first of these new features coming in MIDAS v4.24:

Multi-Select Custom List Fields

One of the reasons our room bookings software is so flexible and versatile is that we allow you to create your own bespoke booking fields, and more recently your own bespoke client fields too!

The types of custom booking/client fields you can create in MIDAS are as follows:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field
• File – (self-hosted editions only) Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to client records
• List – A drop-down list of pre-defined items
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range
• Text – A single-line text field
• Text Area – A multi-line text field
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource

Documentation on how to create and use custom fields in your MIDAS system may be found here. We also have a short tutorial covering custom fields too:

Until now the custom “List” field allowed users to select a single item from a list of pre-defined values created by an administrator, and assign the selected item to the booking or client record.

For v4.24, we’re expanding the custom “List” field options to additionally include a “multi select” list option. Administrators can now also create drop-down lists from which users may select multiple options.

Administrators will of course also be able to select which option (or options) in the list are selected by default, and also control whether the list is visible to all users, or restricted to just certain users:

We’re excited about the new custom “multi-select list” field option coming in v4.24. Once again, this has been implemented as a direct result of customer feedback. Remember, we love feedback and feature requests from our customers, so do vote and let us know what you’d like to see in future updates to our software.