Claiming arbitrary resources when you signup

That sounds easy to describe, but it's actually incredibly complicated to implement properly. ;) One thing you *might* be interested, which is a step in the direction of this sort of complication is #584040: Add way to define multiple status options that share a single limit.

However, what you're really asking about is the ability to claim arbitrary resources (each of which have a limited quantity) when you signup. This is the generalized case of the "seat limit".

If we were starting completely from scratch, we'd basically want a way to define arbitrary resources on each node (seats, parking spaces, steak sandwiches, vegan cookies) with a fixed number of each resource. The resources could be grouped (e.g. "lunch type" would contain both "steak sandwich" and "vegan cookie" resources). On the signup form, each resource group would show up in the UI as a form element where you can select which resources, if any, you want to claim with your signup, and perhaps # of resources to claim (if that makes sense). E.g. maybe my signup for this event would say: "1 seat, 0 parking spaces, 1 steak sandwich". The signup validation would enforce that those resources are available, and tell me if not ("sorry, we're out of steak sandwiches, please select another lunch option"). If all the resources I want are available, it'd let me signup and record the resources claimed by that signup. Then, when the next person tries to signup, it would know how many of each resource are still available...

This is an even more complicated problem than #29568: Flexible number and type of fields, since not only do you need a reasonable way to define all the resources for each node, you need to be able to specify how many of each one is available, plus all the additional rules for how to claim/consume them. All sorts of unsolved problems here:

A) What does the UI look like for defining resources and totals?

B) Where do you store this information (e.g. what's the schema look like)?

C) What's the right schema for storing what resources are claimed by each signup?

This is a pretty huge problem to solve. It should probably be blocked on a sane solution to #29568: Flexible number and type of fields -- either D7 core fields or some solution in D6 involving form builder...

All of this should live in a separate add-on module, since a lot of sites won't need this complexity. I don't think this has anything (directly) to do with signup status in fact, so I'm moving it to the main signup issue queue. Even though it's not going to get committed directly to signup.module when this finally exists, more people who care about this topic are likely to see it here and perhaps help implement it (or pool funding together to hire someone to do so).