- After you have set a product up for courses (see How to: Set Up Courses), use the Product Schedule action on the Activity Product Card to define the starting days, time (schedule), and capacity of the course.
- Use the Additional Resources FastTab on this page to set up the required resources, that is the rooms or locations needed, the trainer and equipment.
Note: There is no link or requirement that the date and times in these sections match, so it is the user's responsibility to make sure that settings match. This flexibility is needed, since the resources reservation may have to differ to the actual schedule of the courses.
Note: If the Product Type is set to Course, tall assignments (activities) assigned to the same course at the same date and time will be assigned to the same reservation to collect all participants into one reservation.
- Make sure that the interval type assigned on the course product covers all possible starting times for that particular course, since otherwise the availability views will be missing those schedules.
Payments, booking, and selling course products is the same process as with any other appointment like product.
- Next, create a Reservation to be the container for participants.
- Use the Schedule action to define the assignment of each course session, and assign the required resources.
This reservation type must only allow entry of the activity type Course, which defines what activities (course assignment) can be sold to the participants.
These products would all require the same resource (that defines the availability for the course), but could have different pricing for example, that is senior or junior pricing, but availability derives based on same resource.
On the Resource Reservation Schedule FastTab you can define each session of the course and assign resources for each day of the course duration.
Example:
A training course needs a room to be reserved at a specific date and time, and also needs to reserve the trainer of the course. Since the sessions are on multiple days (and might even be running for multiple weeks or months, you need to reserve the room and the trainer at specific days. In order to do this, you must create the Reservation schedule lines for each day and time of the sessions, and also based on those entries reserve the related resources. You must confirm or release specifically the resource reservations by using the Reserve Resources and Release Resources actions on the Reservation Schedule page.
Schedule Wizard (action on the Reservation Schedule page)
This action is mostly relevant for courses. For example, you might have a course on Mondays and Wednesdays for four months, and you need to reserve the room and a trainer for the course for every session. The Course Schedule Wizard is a helpful tool for that purposes.
The following steps explain the setup and use of the Course Schedule Wizard:
- Create a course reservation. Note: Reservation dates from and to should cover the entire period of four months.
- Go to the Reservation Schedule page and open the Course Schedule Wizard.
- Enter two lines, one for Monday and one for Wednesday (using the Weekday field), and set the times (for example 2 pm - 4 pm), and set the Comment field to Course reserve. Note: If Weekday is not set, the line is valid for all days of the course period.
- Use the section in the lower part of the page to select multiple resources (room and trainer in this example) using standard Business Central multiple record selection.
- Select action "Create Schedule" with resources action, and the wizard will process, and then message the result using dialog page.
The result should be populated in the schedule view now along with the resource assignments. - Reserve (Confirm) the resources with the related reservation action (you can choose either reserve single line, multiple lines or all schedule lines). The Availability field gets status Reserved for each resource line.
Note: There are two actions on the wizard action pane, the default one (promoted) is to create a schedule with resources. A resource is always assigned when you use this option, so if no resources are "multi-selected", the single one where the cursor is placed is selected. If you need to create a schedule but without resource assignments, there is an additional action which does exactly that (click Actions - Create Schedule without Resources). But normal use and the main purpose of the wizard is to assign resources as well as schedule the course.
Note: The reservation must be confirmed before any participants can be assigned to the course.
Note: For courses, a course reservation must always exist with the internal status Confirmed, before any participants can be assigned.