By default, you can either configure your resource's starting time to be freely chosen by customer within your working hours or you can limit the starting times to specific ones but these times would be used for each day of the week.
There are two ways to configure your resource in case you have different starting times on different weekdays (and assuming that the customer cannot just choose any starting time which would be the case when offering tours etc.):
Method 1
This is the preferred method. Start by going to
time-related settings of your resource and in the field
Restrict starting times choose all the possible starting times for the different weekdays. E.g. if on Mondays you allow your rentals to start at 9am and 11am, on Wednesdays at 10am and on Fridays at 12pm, enter:
9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm (you can of course use the notation 9:00, 13:00 etc.).
Now go to
Automatic updates of form items and choose your resource on top of the page. If you don't see the resource, this means that you're using the global form in which case choose
All resources.
Now you'll need to add rules which will change the available starting times based on the weekday chosen in the date field. Following our example, enter new rules as follows:
Rule 1:
Trigger item: Date
Trigger value: Monday
Dependent item: Start time
Dependent value: 9am, 11am
Rule 2:
Trigger item: Date
Trigger value: Wednesday
Dependent item: Start time
Dependent value: 10am
Rule 3:
Trigger item: Date
Trigger value: Friday
Dependent item: Start time
Dependent value: 12pm
The
Dependent value field should include comma-separated starting times for given weekday. Planyo will automatically replace the times listed by default (taken from time-related settings of the resource) with the values from the rule for the currently chosen weekday.
Note:You can use this exact mechanism in order to configure different starting hours for different seasons (e.g. summer/winter season). The only difference is that the trigger value should include a date range using the format
from YYYY-MM-DD to YYYY-MM-DD.
See
Q233 for more info about automatic updates of form items.
Once the start times are configured, you should go to
Resource vacations and add weekly recurring vacations for the unavailable times for your resource. E.g. following our example above, you could enter the following vacations:
Mondays (recurrence: week) from 10am to 11am
Mondays (recurrence: week) from 12pm to 1pm
Tuesdays (recurrence: week) from 8am to 1pm
Wednesdays (recurrence: week) from 9am to 10am
Wednesdays (recurrence: week) from 11am to 1pm
... and so on for all the other days of the week. This way the calendar previews will also correctly reflect your working hours and also the search will not show incorrect results.
Method 2
This method makes sense if you have very few starting time choices in a week. You start by changing your resource to event-type. You do this in
time-related settings by clicking on the link
Choose the resource type, then choose
This is an event and in the field
Event dates/times you'll need to enter all the possible starting times during the entire week and then tell Planyo that these events will be recurring weekly. To do this, start with the date of current week's Monday e.g. 2023-05-22 and add the first starting time, e.g. 9:00. You'll need to use the formula for weekly recurring event times, e.g.
52*weekly 2023-05-22 9:00 means that the event can take place each Monday at 9am starting on this date and for the duration of 52 weeks (1 year). Once you have your first event time entered, you'll add the other times (these are comma-separated values). Add the remaining starting times on Monday and then continue for all the dates of the weekdays of the same week. The entire field will look like this:
52*weekly 2023-05-22 9:00,
52*weekly 2023-05-22 11:00,
52*weekly 2023-05-24 10:00,
52*weekly 2023-05-24 12:00,
52*weekly 2023-05-26 9:00. This formula will allow for the following starting times: Mondays at 9am and 11am, Wednesdays at 10am and Fridays at 12pm.
The disadvantage of this method is that you'll need to remember to update the starting times e.g. in 10-11 months to allow customers to choose future dates. Also, event-type resources use different calendar previews (you can change the defaults if you'd like) and more importantly, different reservation form fields. Instead of separate date and time fields, the customer will simply see a dropdown with all the possible future date/time combinations to choose from.