I've looked around quite a bit for this and it seems nobody has come up with a solution in the past few years :/

The way I'm hoping to implement MERCI is to have desk staff signing out equipment on the spot with the ability to make reservations in advance. Other people that can use the service won't be able to place requests in advance (they really aren't... savvy enough yet for that). We have lots of duplicates of items (for example, Flip Cameras 1-8) so I was hoping to use buckets to classify Flip Cameras, and then be able to choose the number afterwards to avoid cluttering the list of items with plain resources.

Now, ideally you would be able to choose which item from the bucket you want right after choosing based on availability, but I see that hasn't been implemented. I'd rather not have the extra step of having to edit the reservation to choose which item is taken out, in which case it's just easier for us to keep with paper records.

Are there any plans to add this option in the future? Has anybody come up with a solution on their own?

Comments

darrick’s picture

darrick commented

Have you tried checking "Automatically assign a bucket item": Automatically assign the best fit bucket item when reserving a new bucket item. It's on the edit content type page. You'll still need to edit the reservation to set it to checked out as you can't do that when adding items. I've been thinking about getting rid of that restriction but haven't looked into it yet.

Also the merci_staff module will allow your staff to make reservations for other users.

saladbar15’s picture

saladbar15 commented

It's better, but it would be nice to be able to choose on the spot as most of our reservations are walk-ups.

I have been experimenting more with equipment groups, so I may switch over to just resources in groups for now. Honestly this is the one thing keeping us back at the moment. We've got a whole summer ahead of us to optimize the process so I'm not too concerned.

I'll keep experimenting and keep my eye out for updates!

saladbar15’s picture

saladbar15 commented

Just thought I would update on this. I managed to create a combination of buckets and resources that seems to work well for our purposes. The ability to choose from a bucket and have it assign an item when the status is set to check out would be extremely useful though, as there are some items we definitely want as buckets (like projectors, all of which are identical).

I have to say though, great work on this. Of all the systems I've found in my search, this is definitely the most robust one out there. Thank you!