Extensive booking rules

Not every room should be open to everyone. Meeting rooms are often available to all staff, while specialist rooms, event spaces or laboratories should only be used by certain people or after approval. Booking rules are where you draw those lines – and Zeitwart enforces them on the server, not just in the interface.

Opening hours first

The most basic rule is when a resource can be used at all. Outside its opening hours a room simply cannot be booked, which keeps the evening and the weekend free unless you deliberately open them.

Limits that keep things fair

Alongside opening hours sit the rules that stop a few people absorbing all the capacity:

• maximum and minimum booking duration

• earliest and latest point at which a booking can be made

• how far in advance bookings are possible

• how many bookings a person may hold at once

• bookings only on particular weekdays

A typical result: staff may book rooms up to six months ahead, students only seven days ahead, and guests see only certain rooms at all.

Inherited, and overridable

Rules sit on the organisational unit and are inherited by everything below it. Set a rule once on a parent unit and it applies to every room underneath; override it on a single unit where that room needs to behave differently. Numeric rules are edited in a table, more complex ones as a JSON block.

Enforced where it counts

The rules are checked on the server. A booking that breaks them cannot be created through the interface, through the API or through an integration – there is no side door that bypasses them.

Benefits at a glance

• opening hours, durations, deadlines and limits per organisational unit

• rules inherited down the tree, overridable where needed

• combinable freely and adjustable at any time, without programming

• enforced server-side, so integrations cannot bypass them

• different rules for staff, students and guests through their roles