Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello,

After demonstrating the Bookings app to facilitate the booking of assets to my bosses, they were impressed but wanted other information to be captured which sits outside the scope of Bookings.

My organisation is very new to the Power platform and hasn't allowed Power Apps to be rolled out yet, otherwise I would have made an app to do the asset booking.

So, I am left with using Forms to collect the information from the user. I have a flow that captures data from the form and populates a bookings Sharepoint List.

We have 5 laptops that can be booked out within our department, this could be increased to 30 across the organisation. The details of these laptops are held on laptops Sharepoint List.

The flow checks some information and based on compliance auto approves or flags for review.

Once the flow is auto approved or done manually, I want the flow to then select an available laptop. Availability will be based on columns 'Laptop required from' 'Laptop required until' and 'Allocated Laptop' columns on the bookings list.

I understand that the flow will have to look at the dates of the current booking, discount any that will be booked out on those dates and return the value of a laptop that is available (or return that none are available - very unlikely but has to be considered.

I've watched a few videos and scoured this and other forums but at a bit of a loss on how to get this part of the flow to work.

Example:

Name	dateFrom	dateUntil	Approved	Laptop
John Smith	25/12/24	26/12/24	Yes	LAP0001
Joe Bloggs	21/12/24	28/12/24	Yes	LAP0002
Florence Nightingale	23/12/24	25/12/24	Yes	???????

The third request is the one which requires a Laptop allocated. As the request dates conflict with previous bookings for LAP0001 and LAP0002, only LAP0003, LAP0004 and LAP0005 are available so one of those needs to be selected by the flow. Once this has been done, the flow will email the details to the user, which I am comfortable composing.

KRs : )

Categories:

Building flows

Since you can't find a non-existent booking, you must solve by the inverse. For each laptop, find an existing conflicting booking that would exclude it from being able to be booked for the requested timeframe.

(RequestedStart >= BookingBegin AND

RequestedStart <= BookingEnd)

(RequestedEnd >= BookingBegin AND

RequestedEnd <= BookingEnd)

PSEUDOCODE

-----------------

Parameters:

pdtmBegin

pdtmEnd

pstrEmail

Variables:

booIsAvailable - Boolean: True

booHasBeenBooked - Boolean: False

Get Items Laptops (All)

For Each Laptop

Condition: booHasBeenBooked = False //Prevent booking more than one

Yes:

Set Variable booIsAvailable = True //Assume it can be used until proven false

Get Items Bookings (For current laptop, use criteria above for the filter.)

For Each Booking

//By virtue of the fact that an existing booking was returned, set to False

Set Variable: booIsAvailable = False

//End For Each Booking

Condition: booIsAvailable = True

Yes: Create new Item

Send booking email

Set Variable: booHasBeenBooked = True

//End Condition: booIsAvailable

//End For Each Laptop

This code has no provision for optimization/exceptions. For example, if one user returns a laptop earlier or later than booked. Or, perhaps after each booking, the IT department needs to perform maintenance.

You could easily ignore any booking returned early, but one that is returned late can cause severe havoc. So, be sure to implement a routine to reallocate resources when this occurs.

Writing the ODATA in the GetItems isn't easy nor intuitive. Feel free to ask specific questions about it.