Booked includes a lot of features that you may not know about. In this article we’ll talk about extending Booked to gather additional information from your users. For example, you may need to know the configuration of seating for a room, or mileage out and mileage in for fleet management.

Reservation Custom Attributes

Custom Attributes provide a powerful way to make Booked fit the way your organization works. We’ll first look at reservation attributes, which are the most common and useful type of custom attribute. Open Application Management > Custom Attributes to get started. Click Add an Attribute and you’ll get a form like this

We offer a few different options for the types of attributes to add. Single Line Textbox, Multiple Line Textbox, Select List, Checkbox, and Date Time. Just pick the type and set a Display Label. Here’s what a Select List may look like on the reservation screen.

Every time a new reservation is made or updated, the user will be prompted for these additional pieces of data.

Let’s Get Crazy

We just covered the most basic reservation custom attributes, but we can do a lot more with custom attributes.

An attribute can be required or optional. Ok, that’s not so crazy, but it’s useful.

An attribute can also be used for Admins Only, which means regular users will never see it, but admins will. This is perfect for capturing internal-only information that the user is not able to provide or should not see.

Private attributes are a lot like admin only attributes, but the reservation owner will also have access to it. Again, this is great for confidential information that the user provides.

Collect In Specific Cases is an interesting option that only adds the custom attribute in specific scenarios.

Using this option you can add custom attributes to the reservation screen only if the reservation is being made by a specific user or if the reservation includes a specific resource. You can almost think of this as a user or resource custom attribute where the values are provided as part of the reservation.

An example use case for this may be a unique characteristic of a conference room. Let’s say only rooms of type “Auditorium” have a podium and you need to know whether or not a microphone is needed. If you pick the Auditorium resource type in the Collect In Specific Cases then users will only see this if they’re booking an Auditorium room.

Other Attribute Categories

You can also add additional attributes to Users, Resources, and Resource Types.

These are pretty self explanatory. User attributes are entered on registration, user profiles, and within the admin tools. Resource attributes are entered on the resource management screen. Resource Type attributes also show up on the resource management screen, but are limited to resources of a specific type.

The options for creating custom attributes here are similar but not as extensive as Reservation custom attributes. One difference for these types of attributes is that you can choose which specific items the attributes apply to. You can have completely different attributes for different resources, for example.

But wait, there’s more…

Custom attributes automatically get included in reports, so you can easily export that information and build custom data views.

Resource custom attributes show up as filter options on the Schedule and Find a Time pages.

You can color code reservations based on custom attribute values. So if you have a select list of options, you can make all reservations with option 1 selected red and option 2 selected can be blue. Perfect for at-a-glance categorization.

You can also show reservation custom attribute values in the reservation label on the schedule page.

So instead of (or in addition to) the owner name or reservation title, you can show user-provided information. To do this, first go find the Id of the attribute you want to include.

Then go into Application Configuration and change the reservation.label setting to be {att#} where # is the Id of the attribute. Alternatively, you can include all attributes by setting this to {reservationAttributes}

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This article was written on November 6, 2019, so check your documentation for the latest options.