Release Date: April 19th 2023
Summary: Release 1.38.0
We have continued to take a holistic approach to the issues faced with activities, especially concerning Clash Detection. This release sees a number of fixes to define the clashing behaviour as well as a number of UX enhancements to prevent confusion and subsequent support tickets in this area.
Choose Billing Day
This is a subtle change to the UI where the customer (or FOH staff) have to select their billing day when purchasing a recurring membership. The form used to default to the 1st. However, some clients have requested we make the customer choose. This is because it is increasing their liability when collecting by direct debit. This will help distribute the payment dates.
The billing day must now be selected by the customer when purchasing a membership online.
FOH staff are now prompted to choose the payment day when selecting a recurring membership on behalf of a customer.
Activities: Clash Detection
Clash detection is complex and the behaviour of clashes are dictated by the setting [Allow activities created with this template to overlap other activities until booked] within Ad-Hoc & Fast Ticket activity templates. This compromised a lot of collective investigation and testing.
The setting has three options:
- Never: Activities scheduled with this template will not overlap any other activities
- Always: Activities scheduled with this template will overlap with others, unless they are set to never overlap. When a customer books one of these activities, overlapping activities will automatically become unavailable.
- If they have the same template: Activities scheduled with this template will overlap with others using this template. When a customer books one of these activities, overlapping activities will automatically become unavailable.
The original behaviour of the clash detection was as follows:
- General visibility: an activity cannot be scheduled at the time in a certain resource as another activity is already there and published. This is the behaviour of the ‘Never’ setting.
However as our activity templates and client needs evolved, we allowed overlaps, so that clashes were intentional. The main use for this was the Sports Hall example:
- Client can schedule multiple ad-hoc activities in the same space at the same time
- e.g. Badminton, Volleyball and Table Tennis are all scheduled at 9am in the Sports Hall
- This gives the client the flexibility to offer multiple activities
- When one of these activities are then booked, the other two are cancelled by Flow, and no longer bookable.
Note: Classes do not have this setting, they are ‘Never’ by default, and will always win and show as clashing if you tried to schedule something over a class.
The setting Allow activities created with this template to overlap other activities until booked has been the route cause of the changes in behaviour of published schedules. One might have expected that of they have updated this setting, immediate changes would occur. But this is not the case. We have made a UI enhancement (see further down below) to prevent this from occurring in the future.
Activities: Updating 'Fast Ticket' Tickets
Question: We were asked by our clients to investigate the behaviour of adding / deleting / editing tickets at the template level and the impact on published schedules
Answer: Flow projects FT schedules 6 months in advance when published (or the max length of the schedule if it has an end date). If an extra ticket is added to the template this change won’t happen until 6 months +1 day. We acknowledge that this makes things difficult for our clients and have added it to our future considerations.
Workaround: If clients need a schedule to reflect new ticket changes they should cancel the schedule, update the template and reschedule it with the new tickets.
The diagram below shows the behaviour of the changes. Template 1 will see these changes in 6 months time. Schedule 2, which is shorter, will not.
Activity Clashes: Next Steps
During 1.38.0, we have made significant changes.
We locked down some rules, fixed bugs and changed the UI.
Our team has decided that we should pause anymore fixes until we have understood the full impact.
We are currently working to deploy a clash Testing tool which will allow us to see the impact of published, bookable schedules before we deploy further changes.
Show Activity Template settings in when scheduling
The aim of this product enhancement is to allow staff to check the settings of a template at the scheduling stage and confirm that the template has the desired settings.
1. When creating a new schedule, the user can click the ‘View Template Settings’ button down below:
2. Clicking the button opens the following window outlining the selected Activity Template Settings.
Disable Overlapping Template Settings when in use
The aim of this product enhancement is to stop users from editing certain template settings after publishing. As there is no record of changes made to a template’s settings, the enhancement will prevent unexpected behaviour (such as unwanted overlaps that were due to a change in template settings).
When a Fast Ticket or Ad-Hoc schedule has been published, then it is no longer possible to edit the following settings within the associated template:
- Allow activities created with this template to overlap other activities until booked
- Allow customers to book activities created with this template at the same time as other bookings
🐞 Key Defects
Activities are not reinstated when block booking schedules are cancelled
When a BB was scheduled and cancelled, then any Ad-Hoc activities booked during that time did not get reinstated when they were cancelled. This bug has now been fixed, and the ad-hoc activity does get reinstated as expected.
Unable to cancel certain schedules
A bug prevented cancelling ad-hoc activities when they were overlapping with block bookings. This has now been resolved.
When you cancel a block booking on the facility calendar, the activity remains visible
Cancelled Block Bookings are now no longer visible in the Facility Calendar or FOH. They are also removed from schedules as expected so that no clashes are detected.
Can't cancel activities in the schedule preview if they haven't been saved yet
When previewing an activity schedule (prior to saving) a bug prevented the user from cancelling selected activities. This has now been resolved.
'Ghost' Booking remains on Facility Calendar
When scheduling two Fast Ticket activities (both set to ‘overlap always’), both activities still appeared in the facility calendar even when one of them was booked. This is no longer the case, and only the booked activity is seen in the calendar.