Adventures with WSS3.0 Room and Equipment Reservation Application Template

UPDATE 4/7/2008 - 11:06PM:
I spent a few more hours digging through the template and doing some testing. In the end, I simply cannot recommend the RER template for critical production use. Specifically, the email Alerts just don't work consistently. *I also could never figure out how to keep the Status field from being displayed in the email Alert body text (without making more changes than it was worth anyway).

But the use of Alerts was a core requirement for my needs - and without that... well, it's pretty much useless to me.

I probably created 50 sites during testing, and I simply never got the same results with Alerts. Sometimes email Alerts would only trigger on the real "Requested" status'es - while other times they'd be triggered by the "Available" status'es... and *sigh* - sometimes they simply wouldn't be triggered at all.

I do know there are a lot of people complaining about Alerts in general. Specifically, how reliable they are and to what extent they should be counted on. But I've never had much of a problem with them on the servers in question. They're anything but 100% - but still - they've always been pretty consistent for me. Sadly, such was simply not the case with my adventures with the RER template.


ORIGINAL POST:

After I installed Sharepoint’s RER app template, I quickly realized just how limited its use was.
Upon installation, I quickly realized that by default – you can NOT SEE other people’s reservations?!? What the heck is up with that?

For working with the actual reservations, you get 2 pages: “Reserve a Resource” and “My Reservations”. Reserve a Resource allows you to see (ONE-DAY-AT-A-TIME) other people’s reservations – but you can NOT tell anything about the reservation itself (i.e. who made it). And of course on the My Reservations page – you guessed it – you only get your own reservations listed. They actually give you a third page that they don’t bother including a link to – you just kind of have to stumble upon it – “Reservations Calendar” – by changing the view on the “My Reservations” page. But guess what? IT ONLY SHOWS YOUR OWN RESERVATIONS TOO – just in a calendar view. Why so secretive Microsoft?!? Well, actually there is one view that shows everything – “Allitems” view – but it’s a LIST view… come on Microsoft…

So it’s about this time that you start going – well surely I can just change those view filters and do what I want. HAH! So so wrong.. You see, to make this Reservation process work in a way that doesn’t allow overlapping reservations – Microsoft devised a method consisting of a hidden Status field called “RERStatus”. It is a choice field with values of Available and Requested (there’s also Approved I believe, but I’ve never seen it used). Now like I said, this field is completely hidden by definition and you cannot get your hands on it. Which is actually a good thing by default because you can totally hose the reservations by screwing around with it (and make your resources appear booked forever).

The methodology is nothing magic.. they simply use the status to indicate when you can make the reservation. For a day with let’s say a 9:00AM-11:00AM reservation, the list table will have entries like the following:

Conf Room 1 12:00AM 9:00AM Available
Conf Room 1 9:00AM 11:00AM Requested
Conf Room 1 11:00AM Available

If you pop open the RoomEquipmentReservations.wsp (aka .cab file) – you can open the ReservationEventHandler.dll with Reflector and see the code used to check the Status and Date Range and either make the reservation or error out with the appropriate message.

Now moving on… If you do get all brave and decide you want the ability to create/manipulate your own views and do whatever you want with this magic “Status” field – you’ll want to modify the List Field attributes in the schema file.

If you’ve already installed the template – you’ll find the schema.xml file here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ReservationsList\Reservation\schema.xml

If you haven’t installed it – you can crack open the ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp (aka .cab file) – and edit this guy:
ReservationsList\Reservation\schema.xml (just make a backup first)

The part you’re looking for is:
<Field ID="{6f99f38c-e91f-46be-a4f8-255f793967c9}" Name="RERStatus" Group="RER Columns" Type="Choice" DisplayName="$Resources:rer,RERStatus_DispName;" Hidden="TRUE">

CHANGE TO:
<Field ID="{6f99f38c-e91f-46be-a4f8-255f793967c9}" Name="RERStatus" Group="RER Columns" Type="Choice" DisplayName="$Resources:rer,RERStatus_DispName;" ShowInNewForm="FALSE" ShowInEditForm="FALSE" ShowInDisplayForm="FALSE" Hidden="FALSE">

Notice I added the attributes ShowInNew/Edit/ViewForm because if you don’t – after you set that Hidden=TRUE property - the field will be visible and changeable everywhere (which would be really, really bad).

*Note1: I couldn’t figure out how to keep the Status field from displaying in email Alert body’s.
**Note2: If you edited the installed schema.xml – you’ll have to restart IIS to pickup your change.

Anyway, you now have a site with the magic Status field visible in the right places so you can use it however you like.

You should now be able to edit any of the existing Views and see the real Filter parameters and how they’re using “NOT EQ Status=Available” everywhere to keep out the placeholder records... So you can now create your own views or modify the existing ones to your liking.

BUT BE WARNED, if your permissions allow your members to CREATE VIEWS (which they do by default) – I HIGHLY SUGGEST you remove those permissions, else users could possibly create their own views and NOT take into account the Status field (thereby pulling records they shouldn’t). Because once those placeholder (Status=Available) records are visible – people will see them and get confused/delete them and trash the site/etc.

You can set these permissions here:
People and Groups - Site Permissions - Settings/Permission Levels.
You'll normally modify Contribute access (because that's what Members have by default - and Members are probably the ones you have designated as having the ability to make reservations).
* Note: You will have to disable inheriting permissions from parent site to make this change:

So after clicking Contribute - scroll down to Personal Permissions and MAKE SURE "Manage Personal Views - Create, change, and delete personal views of lists." is UNCHECKED.

*Another tip – if you’ll notice, the “Reservations Calendar” view doesn’t have the toolbar on by default. If you try and edit the Web Part to put it back – you’ll get some screwy results (mine would often disappear entirely). The alternative is to set it at the source (back in the same schema.xml file as the List Field definitions):

To set it, find this:
<View BaseViewID="3" Type="CALENDAR" WebPartZoneID="Main" DisplayName="$Resources:rer,ReservationsCalendar_ViewName;" SetupPath="pages\viewpage.aspx" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/announce.png" Url="ReservationCalendar.aspx" Scope="Recursive">
<Toolbar Type="None"/>

And change it to “Standard” for the full normal toolbar:
<View BaseViewID="3" Type="CALENDAR" WebPartZoneID="Main" DisplayName="$Resources:rer,ReservationsCalendar_ViewName;" SetupPath="pages\viewpage.aspx" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/announce.png" Url="ReservationCalendar.aspx" Scope="Recursive">
<Toolbar Type="Standard"/>

*** Notes about RER and Email Alerts:

My new custom views consist basically of clones of the originals – only filtered to show a single resource. For example, I created individual Calendar Views for each individual Resource. This just makes it a little nicer for users wanting a calendar view to only have to look through entries for the particular resource they’re interested in. I also took the opportunity on these custom Calendar views to change it so that the Reserved By field is displayed on the calendar date instead of the Resource name.

Everything was rolling along fine until I realized you can’t create alerts from Calendar views. So I thought – OK – I’ll just create List views for each calendar.. basically the same filter and everything – just a List instead of a Calendar. You can then select THOSE List views in the Alert setup.. but for some reason I cannot get these to work. The existing default views (MyReservations and Allitems) trigger Alerts perfectly – but I cannot seem to get my custom List views to trigger them. I see them setup in the ImmedSchedule table in the WSS_Content database – but they don’t seem to be triggered for some reason.

I hope to have a resolution soon and I will update my findings.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.