How To Restrict Bookings To Fixed Durations

This tutorial covers how restrict users to only be able to make bookings of specific pre-defined lengths.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

Defining list of possible duration.
Assigning duration lists to user accounts.
Setting a duration list for public web bookings/requests.

Tutorial Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MIDAS tutorials.

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can restrict the length of bookings that your users can make.

Now normally on a user's Add Bookings screen in the time section, there's a start and finish selector, allowing you to set discrete start and finish times.

So theoretically a user could make a booking of any length here.

If you want to restrict that, or if you work in an organization where all your bookings are a fixed length, for example an hour, we can do that through the use of Time Lists.

Now the first thing we have to do is create a new time list.

We do this by going to MIDAS Admin Options, selecting Manage MIDAS, and in the "Fields" tab we locate the Times field and click edit, and then "Edit Time Lists".

Now we wish to create a new time list, so we click the little plus (+) icon and we'll give our list a name.

we'll call this "Durations", and we want to make the type "Durations" and then here we add in our predefined lengths of bookings that we allow.

So for example, if we allow bookings that are either 30 minutes long or 60 minutes long, we can add 30 in there and click Add, and we'll add 60 in there and click Add.

And we'll save changes.

Now that we created a list of durations we need to assign that to individual users.

So we click "Close window" and then from the menu we select "Manage Users and Permissions".

We select the user that we wish to assign this time list to, in this case we'll assign it to ourselves "Tutorial Admin", and we scroll down to the bottom where you'll see there's a time selector here.

Now, "Times" is the standard start and finish times that we saw on the Add Bookings screen, but if we set this to our durations list and "Save Changes".

On our Add Bookings screen now, you'll see that the finish time has been replaced with a length, with our two options 30 or 60 minutes.

So now this user can only specify a start time, let's say 8:00 a.m. and the length of booking, let's say 60 minutes.

Put a venue in, and a name, and you'll see we can only make bookings that last 30 minutes or an hour, and in this case we've made one that lasts exactly an hour.

You can set up multiple time lists in MIDAS, and you can assign different users to different lists.

So this is a great way of being able to control the length of bookings that each user can make in your MIDAS system.

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out some of our other video tutorials online, where I'll cover other ways you can customize the time selector in MIDAS.