How To Control & Customize Booking Fields

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• How to add your own custom booking field.
• Marking fields as optional or required.
• Controlling which fields are visible to which users.

Tutorial Video Transcript

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can control and customize booking fields.

Now typically your "Add Bookings" screen may look something a little like this.

MIDAS allows us to turn booking fields off, reorder booking fields, and we can even add our own.

So let's take each of those in turn.

Let's turn off a field. Let's say we don't want the "booking notes" field.

To turn that off, we go to MIDAS Admin Options.

We select "Manage MIDAS" from the drop down, and on the "Fields" tab - which we're currently on - we untick the box in the "visible" column for "Notes" and save changes.

So now on our Add Booking screen, you'll see we no longer have a booking notes field.

To change the order of fields, let's say we want the "Booking Type" field to appear above the "Expected Attendees" field, we go back to MIDAS Admin Options, Manage MIDAS, and on the "Fields" tab we click "Re-order Fields".

And we're going to move the Booking Type field above the Attendees field, by using these arrows here on the right.

So we'll click move up and you'll see Type is now above Attendees.

We click "OK", and "Save Changes".

Then on our Add Booking screen, you'll see Booking Type now appears above Expected Attendees.

Now, you can also make fields optional or required.

So if we go back and let's reinstate our Booking Notes field so we'll make notes visible again. "Save Changes".

So at the moment the Booking Notes field is optional.

If I try and make a booking here in Room 2, it will allow me to proceed to the next screen, without entering any booking notes.

If I wish to make that field compulsory, I can go to MIDAS Admin Options, Manage MIDAS, and on the "Fields" tab next to the visible column, you'll see there's a "required" column.

If I put a tick in that box and Save Changes, now if I try adding a booking without entering any booking notes, it will tell me that this field is required, and won't let me continue until I've actually added some notes, and then I can proceed.

So finally, I'll now show you how you can create your own custom booking fields.

Again, we go back to our MIDAS Admin Options, Manage MIDAS screen.

On the "Fields" tab we click the "Add Custom Field" button.

We can give our field a name - we'll call this "Custom Field 1".

We can select the type of custom field, and there's quite a range of fields available.

"Text" in a single line text input.

"Number" will only accept numbers.

A "List" will offer a predefined drop-down list of options.

"Text Area" is a multi-line text input.

"URL" will accept a link to a website or other resource.

and if you run a self-hosted edition of MIDAS, you'll also see "File".

This field allows you to upload and attach documents and files to your bookings.

Please note, the file upload field though isn't available in our cloud hosted editions.

So we'll just add a basic text field, and we'll click OK.

So on our Add Booking screen now, you'll see there's our custom field.

Let's add another field, so MIDAS Admin Options, Manage MIDAS.

"Add Custom Field", let's call this "Custom Field 2", and let's make this a "List" field.

Let's add our list items, so let's say "Yes", "No", "Maybe".

We can select a default value for this field, so we'll select "No" as the default, and "OK".

So now when we add a booking, there's Custom Field 1, there's Custom Field 2, with "No" pre-selected, and the other options that we can select.

We'll add one further field. "Add Custom Field".

We'll call this "Custom Field 3", again you can name these whatever you wish, and we'll make this a "File" upload field.

Now again, please note this is only available in self hosted editions of MIDAS.

and we'll click OK, and let's save changes to that.

Now let's try adding a booking, so let's add a booking here, let's add it in Room 2 and 3 for "Jane Doe".

Make it a "confirmed" booking.

Room 2 is going to have five people in, Room 3 is going to have eight.

We can add some custom text in here.

Let's change this value to "Maybe", and you'll see here's our third custom field allowing us to attach a file to the booking if we wish.

But for now we'll click "Check Availability & Book", and as you'll see because we made booking notes a required field a little earlier, it's asking us to enter some notes.

So "some notes", and "Check Availability & Book", and we'll book all available.

And you'll see when we hover over those bookings now the details of our custom fields appear in the booking information panel.

So using custom fields is a great way of being able to capture additional information with your bookings, that isn't covered by the default booking fields.

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out some of our other video tutorials online.