Introduction

Dimensions are things that you can book, such as a room, a person or a product. Out of the box, Booker25 provides dimensions for Resources, Staff, Groups and Contacts. The first 3 are custom objects, while the last one is the Salesforce standard Contact object. This article explains what you can do with dimensions, and how you can create your own.

By using dimensions, you can:

• make sure that bookable items are Included in the Booker25 conflict checking logic. More information about conflict detection: Conflict Checking
• make sure that you only add available items to your reservations by using intelligent lookups (more on this below)
• create calendars for bookable items that will show their reservations. This means you could show a calendar on a contact record page, on which you show in turn see that contact’s reservations. More information about calendars: Calendar Differences
  

Practical example

Imagine you have a fleet of cars and drivers. Your cars are stored in a custom Car object (Car__c), while your drivers are stored in the standard Contact object. You now want to track both your cars and drivers availability. As we mentioned earlier, Booker25 provides a Contact dimension, so you're all set as far as your drivers go. But how do you track your cars? And how do you make sure it does not cost you double work to track which car is assigned to which driver at each moment in time?

Simple! You create a Cars Dimension in Booker25. That way, when you create a reservation from either the driver or the car calendar, and link the other to it as well, Booker25 will draw that reservation on both calendar and keep both in sync at all times!

Technical overview

Dimensions are a powerful way of letting Booker25 know about records on any standard or custom object that are related to Reservations in, either through a lookup or via a junction object:

For a more visual introduction to Dimensions and an example of how they work, please have a look at this video.

First, we start by telling Booker25 about the object that holds the bookable items

1. Go to the Booker25 app
2. Click on the Dimensions tab

3. Click New

4. Fill in the following field
   
   

   Field	Type	Required	Description
   Dimension Object Name	Text	Yes	The API name of an object to which reservations are related. Following the example, this would be Car__c

Define Dimension Fields

Next, we configure a way to link bookable items to reservations

1. On the Reservation object, create a lookup to the Car__c object. (We won't go into too much detail on this one, as it's basic Salesforce admin knowledge)
2. Go back to the Dimension you created in the previous section
3. Go to the Related tab
4. Click New in the Dimension Fields section
5. The only field you currently need to fill in is Dimension Field Name, in which you fill in the API Name of the field you created in step 1 of this section
6. Click Save

The following tables goes into more detail regarding the function of the other fields:

1: Can also be a cross-object reference or a checkbox formula on Reservation. However the latter will not be set yet when working from the Reservation Form UI.
2: Required when Enforce Capacity Check is enabled.
3: Can also be a number formula, and can also be a cross-object reference.

Define Dimension Junctions

Dimensions Junctions are a way to let Booker25 know which junctions between a dimension and a reservation are important.

An example of this would be a contact list, where you link multiple contacts to a reservation. Using dimension junctions you can:

• Make this list visible on the reservation form
• Make the reservation visible on the contact calendar for each contact in the list
• (Optional) Make Booker25 detect and prevent double bookings for these contacts.

1: Can also be a cross-object reference or a checkbox formula on Reservation. However the latter will not be set yet when working from the Reservation Form UI.

Create trigger hook

For every Dimension Junction you create, make sure you also create a Trigger for its object, which calls the following method: B25.DimensionJunctionTriggerHook.execute()

This makes Booker25 check permissions on the object. Make sure to replace <Dimension_Junction_API_Name> with the actual API name of your object, and <Trigger_Name> with a name that makes sense to you.

trigger <Trigger_Name> on <Dimension_Junction_API_Name> (before insert, before update, before delete, after insert, after update, after delete, after undelete) {
	B25.DimensionJunctionTriggerHook.execute();
}

Displaying Dimension Junctions on the Reservation Form