Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Long time no read

Hi there,

It has been a while since the last post here but that does not mean that I was slacking of. In the silence period 2 new apps have been written.

A lite weight Reservation app and pushData. Reservation app is meant to be embedded to your site and allow for your visitors to make reservations for any events you are hosting.

pushData is to be very short an app allowing you to copy certain columns from source to destination spreadsheets.  More on pushData in the next post.

 

Reservations

Again reservations is meant to be placed somewhere on your site. It is simple but allows for basic options. Your visitor can make a reservation, edit it or delete it.

Reservations will ask you to provide your calendar ID (the calendar is where you make events available for reserving). You allow for a certain number of available seats and the app will take care of the rest.

(a complete manual on how to set this app is available here: Manual )

The app will look like this:

app1

The settings button will be available only for the site owner.(obvious but I wanted to confirm that).

Now when the app is first installed you will want to go to the settings part and set it up and that will look like this:

First of all it will ask for the company/school name and for the calendar containing the event data.

After that it will ask for required fields, that is what the user needs to provide to make a reservation. There is no filed required by the app but you enter what ever it is you want.(the limit is 40 characters).

Finally it will ask for a confirmation message. That is after the visitor makes a reservation an email will be sent to them with the message you enter here.

A few neat options have been added here, you can use the key word “Name” in the message (if name is one of the fields you ask from the user) and the message will contain the visitors name.

And after hitting finish the setup is done.

 

What the visitor can see

First thing would be making a reservation, so if the user hits the “Make reservation” button it will take him to a new user interface.

app2

The green buttons represent dates with seats left, red buttons are displaying events that are full.  The app will show 5 events per page (if available). It will check for 120 days counting from current date to search for events.

It takes the user through the process step buy step, first being to choose a date from the list. After that has been picked it will show text boxes for information you asked for.

app3

When all the fields contain data the submit button will appear.

app4

The process for the user is finished after clicking submit. The app however will open/make a spreadsheet called reservation for you and fill the data provided by the user.

It will make a sheet for every date with reservation information for the visitors who picked that date and one sheet where you can preview all the reservations made. The app will also edit the calendar event decreasing available seats for the event by 1.

 

Canceling reservations is easy for the visitor, after hitting the “Cancel Reservation” button they will be asked to enter their reservation ID. The ID is randomly generated for every reservation and sent to the user in an email.

All they have to do is copy/paste the ID to a text box hit “Cancel” and the reservation will be cancelled. Along it the data from you spreadsheet will be deleted and the number of available seats will be increased by 1.

app5

 

Editing reservations is almost as easy.

First the event ID has to be provided. (the UI will look as the UI for cancellation). If the ID is recognized the app will provide a new interface.

The new UI will be identical to the interface for making a reservation except the text boxes will be filled with previously provided data.

When a change has been made to a reservation the data in your calendar and spreadsheet will be changed accordingly.

 

That is it about the Reservation app, small, simple and powerful.

 

Cheers

 

No comments:

Post a Comment