I have been asked to review an existing room booking application.
The main use case is that a user chooses a day and then chooses a room to have the meeting in. A user may opt to make the booking recurring or ad-hoc recurring, where random future days can be selected for the meeting.
I am having problems with the recurring and ad-hoc recurring use cases: the system will have to check ahead that the room is free for all the dates set by the user otherwise there will be a conflict. Ideally, I want an option where system automatically chooses a free room if there is a conflict (if there is one available). This override feature can be set by the user.
Problems: This could mean that the new room does not have the facilities needed by the user (a requirement from business) or: no rooms are available at a time in the future, system must flag conflict.
So my question is:
- How do I integrate recurring bookings into my system?
- Should I start the user down a different path eg by picking room first then date?
- Have you ever booked a room with ad-hoc recurrance? How do you book a room? Do you look for the room first or time first?