A booking for a venue is made up of at least one session, although multiple or recurring sessions can be created in one go using sheepCRM. This is useful for handling holidays or repeating days where the venue should not be available to users in the self-service app.
We recommend creating or using an internal booking and adding your recurring sessions to it to avoid any clash with legitimate bookings from your users.
Please note: this is an experimental feature and is subject to change in the future.
1. Locate the specific booking in the Old Theme
Due to the experimental nature of the feature, this is not available in the standard view. To get to the correct view, please follow these steps:
Go to the Events Calendar in your flock
Find the specific booking in your calendar and then click on the Details button in the popup
On the details page, click on the Old Theme tab in the right-hand sidebar
Alternatively, you can search for a specific booking directly in the search bar in the header and access the Old Theme in the same manner.
2. Create a template session, or use an existing as a template
On the selected booking in the old theme (see the step above to find this), click on the Open venues panel button. This will bring up a sidebar with the sessions that make up the selected booking. If you have an existing session in this list that you would like to use as the template for the recurring sessions, click on the session in the sidebar. In the new sidebar panel that appears, click on the Duplicate (BETA) button to get to the multiple session feature.
If you do not have a session for the desired venue that can be used as the template, click on the Add another button to bring up a new sidebar panel with the options to create a new session inside the selected booking. Select the venue, activity (if present) and the date (including start and end time) for the first day of the recurring sessions.
Click on the Save button to create the template session. Please note that this will create a session with the date selected, so we recommend setting the date to the first day of the recurring period. With the session created, click on it to view the details in a new sidebar panel. Click on the Duplicate (BETA) button to get to the multiple session feature.
3. Create the recurring sessions
On the Repeat sidebar panel, you can toggle whether you want the session to be a simple duplicate, or act as a recurring session that spans multiple days. By default this is set to a simple duplicate, but can be changed to recurring by checking the Repeating field to Yes. Doing so will bring in new fields, which are outlined below:
New start date
Set the start date of the first duplicate or recurring session. This should generally be set after the start and end date of the session using as a template.
Repeats Every
This selects how often the session should repeat, the second dropdown sets the 'measurement' of the repeat (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) and the first dropdown sets the number of the 'measurements' to pass before repeating. See below for examples:
First Column | Second Column | Outcome |
1 | day | Place a new session every day |
2 | days | Place a new session every other day |
1 | week | Place session(s) every week* |
2 | weeks | Place session(s) every other week* |
1 | year | Place a session on this date every year |
2 | years | Place a session on this date every other year |
*On (only available when selected 'week' in the field above)
With the week setting selected, you are also able to specify what days the sessions should be created for in the week. Check the days that you would like a session to be placed for. As an example, if you wanted to create a session every Wednesday and Friday, you would check the W and F boxes.
Ends
The recurring sessions can be set to end in two ways: either on a specific date or after a certain number of occurrences.
To make the recurring session stop on a specific date, check the On toggle and enter a day for the session to end. The moment the duplication process reaches this date, no more sessions will no longer be created.
To make the recurring session stop after a number of occurrences, check the After toggle and enter a number. After the duplication process runs the desired number of times, no more sessions will be created.
Once the settings have been made, click on the Save button to begin the duplication process. After running, the session will have been duplicated multiple times for the specific venue. This process can be repeated for each venue as needed.
After this process, if you look in the self-service app, you'll now see the days marked as unavailable (or with limited spaces if slots are still available)
Repeating Session Examples
Create sessions every Wednesday and Friday for 5 weeks.
Create a session on the 1st of each month until the end of the year.