Calpendo 7.0 is now ready and will be rolled out to everybody in the next day or so.

There’s a lot included in the new release that you might find useful, and there’s a list of them all below. The executive summary of the biggest items is:

• Booking subtypes – when adding custom properties to bookings, you can now have a different set of properties on each resource.  So you might ask for patient details when booking an MR scanner, but not when booking a conference room.
• Time templates have had a tweak in the way they transition from far term to regular and regular to near term.
• Support for other authentication methods (eg single sign on)
• Faster start-up time
• Automatic timestamps and version numbers when projects and other things are changed.
• Soft locking – so you know when two people are editing the same thing at the same time.
• File attachments – upload files and attach them to bookings or projects. For example, to attach ethics approvals or other documents to a project.
• Native Excel file export (xls and xlsx formats)
• A new booking rule type that can reject a booking based on a search for something else (such as checking whether you’ve done appropriate training recently enough)
• Conditions extended so you can now do things like find all the projects that have not had a booking in the last 6 months or that have had more than 10 bookings in the last week.
• The API has been extended to make access to Calpendo data better for external programs

For those that want more detail, there’s a more complete list below.

The Big Stuff

Booking sub-types

If you add custom properties to bookings, you can now have different properties appear for different resources. So you might ask for patient details when booking an MR scanner, but not when booking a conference room.

Time Template Transitions

When creating a time template, you can specify a time template that applies far into the future, and also in the near term. For example, you may not allow booking more than 6 weeks into the future. It used to be the case that a time template from 9am to 5pm would only use a rolling transition. By that, I mean that if it is now 3pm, then 6 weeks from now you can book from 9am to 3pm, but not yet 3pm to 5pm.

There’s now an option for an instant transition as well as rolling transition. With instant transition, at 9am, the whole of the time template from 9am to 5pm 6 weeks into the future would become available for booking.

Authentication

There’s now support for single-sign-on and other authentication methods. This means you don’t need to have a separate password for Calpendo and other systems you access.

This includes an updated login page and new user registration page. Is also easier to disable user self-registration for those sites that prefer to do this.

Faster Start-Up Time

Particularly on slower network connections, you should notice a faster start up time.

Automatic Timestamps

As well as storing all activity in the audit log, Bookings have always directly stored the date and time when they were created and last changed. This has now been extended to other data types including Projects and can be added to your own custom types too.

Automatic Version Tracking

Some built-in data types and your own custom types can now keep track of their version number. For example, every time you edit a project, its version number is increased by one. This can now prevent somebody overwriting other people’s changes by making sure when you save something, you were editing the latest version to begin with.

Soft Locking

When you begin editing anything, if it appears that anybody else is editing it already, then you will be warned.

File Attachments

You can now upload files and have them stored in the database. For example, you can attach documents to projects, such as ethics and other approvals.

Bookings Calendar Update

For a while now, we’ve strongly recommended particular display settings for the bookings calendar. This update now forcibly updates the settings to the recommended values, although you can change them again afterwards if you prefer.

The change means that Calpendo will always show a column for resources in the calendar, even if there are no bookings present. Also, each column will show a heading giving the name of the resource.

Native Excel Export

Reports can now be exported in native Excel formats (xls and xlsx). This is particularly useful for countries that use a comma as a decimal separator such as most non-English European countries.

API Changes

Starting with this release, the API (Application Programmer Interface) for connecting other programs to Calpendo will be documented. New in this release is support for making complex search queries on the database, and getting back only the columns you need.

There are also some breaking changes to the API, so if you were already using it, please contact us.

New Booking Rule: Search Results Rule

This lets you perform a search for some data, and the rule can be configured to fail depending on the number of search results found. For example, you can create a Training biskit that captures information about when each person goes on training courses that are required for your facility. Then, create a Search Results Rule that checks that the person making the booking has received training on the relevant resource in the last 6 months or 12 months etc.

Permissions

Some changes have been made to make permissions a little easier to understand.

There used to be a permission property called “positive” that was a boolean property with values true or false. This has now been renamed to authorisation and you now choose from the options “Grant permission” and “Deny permission”. It should now be clearer whether a permission that matches will actively allow an action (by granting permission) or stop an action (by denying permission).

Also, support for what we called “definitive permissions” had been dropped. They were a source of confusion. Also, they were not even necessary because every definitive permission could always be represented as two non-definitive permissions.

The permissions page shows the permissions differently now. This is to reflect the fact that permissions for Booking will now also apply to subtypes of Booking.

Automatic Emails

The automatic emails page shows the automatic emails differently now. This is to reflect the fact that automatic emails for Booking will now also apply to subtypes of Booking.

Conditions: Referenced-by

This is an extension of conditions that is turned on when you select the advanced checkbox. It allows you to add a condition on the number of times something is referenced by other things.

For example, you can use it to find all the projects that have not had a booking in the last 6 months, or that have had more than 10 bookings in the last week.

Other Stuff

Boolean Property Values

There have always been “boolean” properties whose values have been “true” or “false”. You can now customise the value labels for each property. For example, you may want “Yes” and “No”, or “On” and “Off”.

Custom User Properties

The new user registration page used to ignore some types of properties. This has now been extended so it supports all the types you are likely to want.

Import

The import page can now handle importing non-ASCII character properly, such as accented characters like é, ä and ç etc.

Whenever anything fails to import for some reason, you now have the option of allowing all the items without errors to be imported; previously it was only an all-or-nothing.

Also, the import supports uploading multiple files at once when you want to import something that includes file attachments.

Rule Misconfiguration

There are some rule configurations that are possible to set up, but don’t make sense. We now detect this and prevent you from saving a rule in such a state.

For example, if a rule only applies when cancelling bookings, then any “Does Not Apply To” that you create should also apply to cancellations.

Licence Entry

The licence tab of the Global preferences page has changed a little.

Template Project

There’s one special “template” project that is used to initialise default values for all properties when creating new projects. If you set any restrictions on project values, for example requiring particular properties to be set, then those restrictions are no longer applied to the special template project.

Third Party Software

The “About” page now has a link to a page that shows what third party software has been used in making Calpendo.

Status Change Buttons on Search Pages

When you search for users, projects or bookings, there are now extra buttons that are displayed as a short cut to changing the status.

For example, you can now easily approve users from a regular user search page. This means that you can replace the standard user approval page with one that only shows a subset of the new user requests. This is useful when you want to assign user administration for a group of users to particular people.

Permissions and Automatic Email Pages

Both of these pages have changed their layout to reflect the need to support booking subtypes.

Cancelling Bookings

The booking pop-up now shows an additional cancel button to remove confusion between cancelling the booking and cancelling the pop-up.

Old-style Searches

The search page was replaced a long time ago. The old version has been hidden for a while, although it still worked. It has now been completely removed. Indications are that nobody was still using the old searches, so this change should affect nobody.

Time Template Recording

You can now add custom properties to TemplateGroup. This is useful if you want to set up different people as administrators for a booking depending on which Time Template applied to it.