Venues not showing up on bookings calendar

I have just installed OSB V6 on Joomla 6 and an trying to setup the following:

I have two sites with a total of 5 rooms that can be booked for various meeting types related to counselling.

• I have defined the meeting types as services.
• I have defined each room as a venue and each room has 9 services listed against them. There are also two 'venues' called online and telephone call.
• I have created two employees that are set up to provide all of the services. For a test, I have put venues on two of their services but not on all of them.

What I want to do on the calendar, is select a date/time, then a service, then a venue (Room) and then an employee.

At the moment, having selected a date/time, I can choose a service and the calendar lists the employees that can provide it, but I cannot get a list of venues to appear?

What am I missing or have not enabled etc?

Is this way of working possible?

I am wondering whether I have to create 5 x each service, one for each venue (room?). That would be a pain.

 

Hi Nigel,
From what you described, your current setup may not be optimal. In OS Services Booking, timeslots are generated based on the relationship between Services and Employees. Venues do not play a direct role in creating timeslots; they are mainly used to provide additional information.
However, don’t worry! In the upcoming version of OS Services Booking, which is planned for release in early 2026, you will be able to define Resources. Previously, resources were essentially employees, but this approach was not always clear—especially for booking systems like yours, where rooms are the main resource.
With the new version, Resources in OS Services Booking can be Room, Staff, Employee, Court, etc.
Your booking flow will remain the same: users select a date, then choose timeslots for services/rooms.
I believe this will be a much better fit for your booking requirements.
Thanks
Dam

Thanks Dam,

I am getting my head around using employees as the room resources. I now remember doing it this way about a year or so ago when we first tried OSSB, but we abandoned the project because some other features didn't work as expected. I am re-visiting the plugin to see if the current version helps us achieve what we need.

Here's our setup:

* 3 sites, with a total of 8 bookable rooms.
* Rooms are booked on an hour by hour basis by psychotherapy counsellors (jooma users that login) to see their clients.
* Counsellors pay for their room hire when they book it or are invoiced later.

what we need is also...

* Counsellors cannot see the details of each other's bookings, just that a room is in use or free..
* Counsellors cannot be in two places at once.

+ Ideally:

Counsellors can enter the name, phone number and email address of their client and the client gets appointment reminders too.

+ Real bonus (I can do some work on this):

We have smart heating in each room controlled via MQTT or Zigbee and Node-RED. At the moment, the system has a manual weekly calendar to set it so that rooms are only heated when occupied. It would be great if we could integrate the bookings system with Node-RED so it could automatically determine when the room heating should be on or off. I presume bookings info is held in a file or database table - any info / schema available for this? Of course, an API would be fantastic!

Thanks

Nigel

Hi Nigel,
When booking a room, there are two options:
- If you make a booking as an admin, you can select the user for your booking.
- If you book as a regular user, currently there is no option to select another user. However, you can still enter your client’s name, email, and phone number during the booking process.
Regarding integration with another system, OS Services Booking does not currently have an output API for this purpose. Of course, we can work together to develop this feature if you’re interested—I think it’s a very exciting idea!
If you have any other questions or would like to discuss further, please let me know.
Best regards,
Dam

Hi Dam,

Thanks for the info. Renaming "Employees" to "Resources" (Rooms / Telephone / Online meeting) the workflow nearly works, however the relationship between a counsellor booking a room and identifying the client for which the room was booked is the missing piece.

Here's the workflow so far:

Rooms (employees) are booked and paid for by a counsellor so they can meet a client there.

1. Counsellor logs in and gets taken to the calendar

2. Counsellor chooses a date

3. Counsellor chooses a service ("Initial meeting", "30 minute session", "Clinical meeting", and so on)

4. Counsellor chooses a room / resource (employee)

5. Counsellor chooses a time slot, adds it to cart and checks out.

6. The booking form and booking summary shows the details of the logged in counsellor - that's fine.

7. The cousellor completes the transaction and gets an email with appointment details and billing info + maybe a calendar invite if setup for this..

What would make the booking system ideal for us is if at step 6 there were fields to enter a client's name and (optional) phone number and (optional) email address so the client also gets a calendar invite. We can't use the customer details fields for this because:

a) The counsellor won't get an email
b) The client will see the payment details for booking the room, which should only go to the counsellor.

If that workflow could be implemented we could move to using OS Services Booking from the current commercial product we're using. Also, in that case, we could start to look at designing an API and/or Webhook to integrate the bookings calendar with other tools like our heating-managed Node-RED server.

Any thoughts?

Nigel

Hi Nigel,
Thank you for your detailed explanation.
Currently, OS Services Booking does not support booking on behalf of another person, so there is no option to display client information at the Checkout page.
However, if you need this feature, we can implement a custom solution to customize OS Services Booking according to your requirements.
Additionally, please let me know the specific details you would like to have included in the API/Webhook output, so we can consider them during the customization process.
If you have any further questions or requirements, feel free to let me know.
Best regards,
Dam

EDIT:

*****
Hi Dam,

Someone has literally just come back to me with a decision that we don't need the feature for notifying the client!!

On that basis, I'll continue the evaluation and see whether we get to a decision about the API/Webhook if we go live with the calendar.

Thanks

Nigel
*****

Hi Dam,

The simplest way to add the needed functionality would be to have some additional fields on the checkout page - say:

Section heading: Also notify.

Name:
Email:
Text message:

And have a template message (ideally editable and with insertable macros!?) - such as:

Appointment reminder:

[Date] [Time] with [Logged in user's full name = the Counsellor].

[Service]

[Location (employee field)]

That is a basic structure that would work without implementing something more sophisticated.

I can give the API and Webhook structure some thought if the above is implemented and we finish this second evaluation to see if we can make it work.

I presume there would be a cost to add the above functionality, or would we swap your time for my involvement in API dev and testing!?

Thanks,

Nigel

Hi Dam,

Someone has literally just come back to me with a decision that we don't need the feature for notifying the client!!

On that basis, I'll continue the evaluation and see whether we get to a decision about the API/Webhook if we go live with the calendar.

Thanks

Nigel

Ok Nigel

Hi Dam,

Another one for a how-to or the wish list:

I now have the rooms ("resources") set up as employees - that provides needed basic functionality.

What I need to do (ideally) is to have rooms as child items of a resource or the venue, so that someone can book out individual rooms or select the parent and book out a group or the entire venue. Even better would be multi-select on employees (resources) during booking.

Another way I could see to do this is if the enhancements coming soon for venue management could associate a venue with a service that books out all the resources (employees) for that location, warning of situations where any of the resources are already booked.

Over to you and thanks again for all your feedback.

PS: The translation for OS_EMPLOYEE_MANAGE doesn't seem to be reflected in the menu. I have changed the definition to "Manage Resources" but the menu still says "Manage Employees"