When is an available bike not available?
If you operate in GBAL mode, or you let your renters book stuff online without allocating a bike right away then you may encounter the following scenario.
You try to add / swap in a seemingly available bike, but get a message like this:
"Time not available for Physical XYZ because 139001 has it reserved....."
To understand how this can happen, you should consider the following common restaurant scenario.
Imagine a restaurant that can seat 40 people in tables of 2.
Before each night they take reservations. Most people just say stuff like: 'table for 2 in the name of Smith, 8pm'
Then you simply have a reservations book / calendar, and when all 20 tables are taken you are FULL.
But sometimes your regulars will call and say 'can I have that window seat next to the piano...' Then you must block off a specific table. (and tick off one of your 20). Typically you would put a reserved sign on that table. In this way when your guests arrive you can ask them to choose a table, knowing you have enough to go around.
But what if someone walks in to the restaurant and says 'hey I want that table; it has not got a reserved sign on it'. You can only give it to them if they have pre-booked, even though itappears to be available. Otherwise you won't have enough tables to fulfil the orders you have taken.
And so it is with BRM and bike reservations. If you mix specific reservations with generic (product line) reservations then you may run into these issues. It is simply respecting the total capacity of each of your product lines, for any give time period. (as well as tracking specific reservations for specific bikes)
If you operate in GBAL mode, or you let your renters book stuff online without allocating a bike right away then you may encounter the following scenario.
You try to add / swap in a seemingly available bike, but get a message like this:
"Time not available for Physical XYZ because 139001 has it reserved....."
To understand how this can happen, you should consider the following common restaurant scenario.
Imagine a restaurant that can seat 40 people in tables of 2.
Before each night they take reservations. Most people just say stuff like: 'table for 2 in the name of Smith, 8pm'
Then you simply have a reservations book / calendar, and when all 20 tables are taken you are FULL.
But sometimes your regulars will call and say 'can I have that window seat next to the piano...' Then you must block off a specific table. (and tick off one of your 20). Typically you would put a reserved sign on that table. In this way when your guests arrive you can ask them to choose a table, knowing you have enough to go around.But what if someone walks in to the restaurant and says 'hey I want that table; it has not got a reserved sign on it'. You can only give it to them if they have pre-booked, even though itappears to be available. Otherwise you won't have enough tables to fulfil the orders you have taken.
And so it is with BRM and bike reservations. If you mix specific reservations with generic (product line) reservations then you may run into these issues. It is simply respecting the total capacity of each of your product lines, for any give time period. (as well as tracking specific reservations for specific bikes)
Here is how that scenario would look in BRM.
The Product Line - 'Trek 8 Fuel - M' is full, on Sat 1st
2/2 booked.
But M50 appears to be available....
However, see the surround of the 2/2 box is purple meaning we also have generic bookings for that date.
on closer inspection - clicking on the 2/2 box we see the following:
on this date: 2020-08-01 this Product Line: Trek 8 Fuel, M
has 2 bookings, 1 generic (purple) and 1 physical (yellow)
