Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Bret Alarcon is joined by EDU Manager Zach Mallock to discuss some helpful tips and tricks when it comes to setting up Rules in your RecTrac database. The duo touch on setting favorite criteria in the Fees and Rules Profile, the hieracrhy of linking levels, and much more!
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:08
hello and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today we have us with us our very own Zach Malloch, and he's going to be talking about rules, tips and tricks. So if you have any questions, please ask them in the q&a section, you can Click that little Button down in the bottom, pop up a little box, and you can ask all your questions in that little box. And we should be able to answer. But if we can't answer everything, we have a q&a document to follow up after the session is over. So you can be on the lookout for that. Also, there's a little chat Button down there kind of reserved that for just more comments or just discussion. So with that, you're ready to talk about some rules Zach.
Zach Malloch 0:49
Yeah, we've got half an hour more than 100 people and a really complicated topic. I'm sure it's gonna go great. Yeah,
Bret Alarcon 0:55
I'm sure, you can cover everything in 30 minutes, right? Yeah,
Zach Malloch 0:58
we'll just go ahead and jump right in then. So can you guys see my RecTrac Screen?
Bret Alarcon 1:06
Yes,
Zach Malloch 1:07
Perfect. Well done. That's working properly. So the first thing I wanted to talk about, and we've had this for a little while, but it hasn't really been widely adopted yet, at least as far as my exposure to things has gone. But it's just a real quick one that can give you a little bit of a leg up on, on creating rules and fees. So we have a rules and fees Profile. I'm in Profile assignments. In the Next Gen UI. This is available in the old 3.1 UI, but it is rules as a three one topic. So I'm only going to be talking in three one today. If you are in Profile assignments, you probably won't see anything for rules and fees. Because if nothing exists, you won't see it in the assignment DataGrid. So you would have to Click Add, you'll have to choose the Profile Type as the rules and fees Profile. And then that will open up and allow you to create a Profile. If I take a look at what is actually in here, we have basically two Tabs that we're working with, we have one for rules, and we have one for fees. And the we have two areas.
Zach Malloch 2:15
So one is for default rules, and one is for default criteria or favorite criteria. And basically what this is, it's a list of all of the criteria that you have available in every single Screen when you create a new rule or a new fee. But you can put a little checkmark next to those. And what that does is per module, so this is for activity, this is for facility, you can choose the most commonly used criteria for those modules. And then when you go in to create a new rule or a new fee for that particular module, you'll have buttons for those right at the top. So you don't have to go hunting for them in that list every single time. The default rules. So in this case, I have a 14 to 16 year old made rule for reservation, I have an opening close time. So I just have some default, blank rules, basically, that I can use as a starting point. And I'm assigning those to be specific for facility. And then maybe for like youth age would be something that I'd use fairly commonly for activity. And maybe I'll add capacity over here for a facility. So I'll hit Save. And those are linked in my environment under my user ID. Since this is a Profile, you can assign it differently for different areas, if you have certain people that tend to use different different types of rules for their areas, it's very easy to do that. But I have a facility open here. And so I'm on the Rules tab when I go to create a new rule, it gives me those defaults already. So I can start with one of those. I'm just gonna go ahead and skip past it. So that we can see on the criteria area, I've got those five favorite criteria as buttons. Now I can still find any of those from the list, but they're just right there, it's a little bit more efficient, a little bit easier. Especially if you're trying to have other people help you Build rules and fees, like it can be maybe overwhelming to go through this list of over 50 different criteria options. Whereas if you tend to only use four or five of them, or whatever it can, it can certainly streamline that process. So just wanted to get that as kind of a baseline bread, I saw a couple of questions or any of those pertaining to that topic.
Bret Alarcon 4:20
Sorry, I was answering one on the middle typing one out. There's another question for those defaults. That means you can just select it to include on the module correct. It doesn't automatically add it to any new item in the module.
Zach Malloch 4:33
Correct? Yeah. So it's it's only about the actual add process. So I'm getting this as an option here for capacity. But you saw it was in that Profile. It doesn't actually change anything here like I didn't all of a sudden Well, I mean, I already had a capacity rule linked at my class level, but it didn't automatically add it directly to this facility or anything like that. So that's a good good distinction. Good question. Okay, Now the next topic I wanted to talk about is linking levels. So this is definitely, I think one of the the key pieces as far as using using the system efficiently. And the nice thing about linking levels is, you know, this is a rules topic focused wreck chat. But it this logic works exactly the same way for rules, it works the same way for feeds, it works the same way for questions, it works the same way for email features. So any of those four components can be applied to linking levels. And so a lot of people will, or that have taken some of my other trainings about rules. Let me just bring up my PowerPoint real quick here. Sorry, I crashed, reopening it. A little bit of filler, I should really have some songs prepared just in case we need to distract people from waiting for me to do something. But where is my linking levels spider, here it is. So I like to use something like this. And you know, personally, I think it's beautiful. I think it takes a lot of artistic license. And this is kind of a blowout of what RecTrac is. And where you link, something is going to affect everything below it. So basically, anytime we have something highlighted here in red, that's the actual item that you would purchase. So it's the activity section that somebody registers, registers for, it's the actual facility that somebody's reserving it's the Type of paths that somebody's purchasing, in all of these different points along the path to get to that area affect that ending item. So if I wanted to say that all activities of a certain Type have the same rule, I just link it at the Type, it applies to all of the activities that have that Type link to it, which then carries down to the sections.
Zach Malloch 6:52
Now this as beautiful as it is, can be a little bit overwhelming to kind of just look at so we have some new hires that are starting up now. And I did it a little bit different where I was kind of building the process. And we're starting with the facility module. So wanted to kind of carry around that same idea here. So we want to remember that the module level is actually one of the linking levels, we can technically link things at the global level to that affects everything in your system. But in practice, I don't see that used very often. But let's say that there's a rule that says you have to be a resident to reserve facilities, you just can't be a non resident, you could link that right at the facility module. And it's one place you do it, and it covers everything that you've got. But then the next level down from the facility module would be the the facility classes. So whenever I do a new install, I like to have people kind of identify the various sorts of facilities that they might have. And we start building a list of classes. And if there's, if you have a set of pools in your district, and they all have the same sort of rules applied to them as far as who can reserve it, who can register what the open and closed times are, you could certainly link something right here. And then that would automatically be attached to every single pool you create from that point forward. The next list we have would be our locations. And so that's the second component of building out a facility you have the facility class, you have a facility location. And if there's something like let's say Hogwarts is a building has a consistent open and closed schedule, you could link that rule for open and close times to the building. And then every single facility that you create as long as it's linked to that location will have those same rules. And then conversely, if you have to change those rules, you only have to go into one place and edit the rules linked to the location and then that automatically applies to everything that falls below it. And then we'd start maybe building out a couple of actual facilities.
Zach Malloch 8:49
So let's start with some pavilions here. So maybe we've got our East Pavilion at Forest Park, we've got our West Pavilion at hits Creek, make sure I pronounced that right. And they we've got to have an actually at Forest Park. So now we're starting to kind of see some relationships that one shouldn't have attached, they're being built. So we can say this is the pavilion class. And we've got two pavilions at Forest Park. And that's the pavilion north, and it is the pavilion east. Oops, that one was a mistake there. Right there. So linking your role at the Pavilion would flow down and affect both of these guys linking your role at this location which flowed and in fact, both of those guys, but we also have a pavilion over here at the creek. So I'm going to establish a relationship there, as long as I can Click in the right place, and relationship here. And so now we can start to see that if I have a rule at the Pavilion level, it's going to affect all three of these but if I have a rule at the location level, it's on Like go into effect the pavilions that actually exist at that location. And so this kind of grouping like with like are finding the consistencies is it's a key to using the system effectively and saving yourself a lot of work as far as managing things goes. And then there's a couple of other areas here, like the sets the Type, the subtype, and the category. And we don't often see a lot of people using Type subtype and category for facilities, but for activities that are very important. And this is just a way to say, Okay, well, you know, maybe not every single pavilion is going to need the exact same rule. But maybe this is going to be the category of large building. And maybe there's only a couple of the pavilions that count as large buildings. So this would just give us another way of linking that not necessarily following that initial flow, so then any rules here would apply to the east pavilion, the West pavilion, but not the North pavilion. And so we get to really pick and choose where that linking is coming into play. And then once again, if we are establishing a rule at any of these places, it's potentially affecting a lot of different things. And if we then change the rule at this single location, it's going to affect a lot of different things.
Zach Malloch 11:19
So less work for more impact is kind of the whole whole thing that we're going for right there. And just to tie this back, you know, it definitely is the same logic. For other modules, I had an example for activities here, where once again, in red, these are all of the individual activity sections. And then we have the activities themselves. And we have a couple of categories, we have a couple of types and subtypes. And so depending on where we're linking things, I'll go ahead and zoom in here, because these numbers are important. So this category of youth has 11 sections that would be affected by linking a rule or a fee here. So rather than changing 11 different rules, or creating and linking 11 different rules, if it's consistent, I can put them in this one place, and then it affects 11 things with only one bit of work to it. So as much as possible, I like to really try to find those consistency areas. And I know it's way easier said than done. And I'm saying this at a point of privilege with not having to work directly with Park boards or, or managers in different areas. But sometimes the difference between having to do something different for every single section. And being able to link something higher up with a little bit more control is potentially a very, very small change to policy to bring things in line. And not to get on a soapbox. But sometimes that also results in better customer service. Because it's a simpler structure. It's simpler to explain, it's simpler for everybody to understand. And you know, so whenever possible, I like to also explore solutions and capabilities that we could run into outside of RecTrac. To, to simplify the ways things are working. And that's definitely not saying that I ever advocate for people to change their business just because it'd be nicer for RecTrac. But sometimes nicer for RecTrac has other benefits of being nicer for other people also. So that is linking levels. Now one of the things that can come into play here, actually, I'll pause just in case there any particular linking level questions,
Bret Alarcon 13:16
we do have one pretty much asking for a separate probably RecTrac on linking levels entirely. The question is, can we have this presentation on linking levels?
Zach Malloch 13:29
Oh, or maybe they just wanted the like,
Bret Alarcon 13:32
oh, yeah, you're probably right, you're probably right. Yes. So we're gonna be posting this document or we can post this document to the wreck chat, after other RecTrac Support Site after this presentation. So be on the lookout for that along with this recorded video.
Zach Malloch 13:48
Yeah, and I will, I'll take a screenshot of this assuming that it's useful to people. So. So let's talk about or groups here. And actually, I think I have a better example than this one.
Zach Malloch 14:08
Perfect. All right. So we've got a couple of different things going on. In this DataGrid. I've got six different or five different rules that are linked directly to this individual facility. And I've got one role linked at the or two roles linked at the facility parent module is basically to reserve a facility, everybody has to be over 21 years old, and you're not allowed to cancel if it's on the web. And that that applies for everything. So you'll notice that these rules will show up in every single facility that I have in my entire system because of that linking level. That's the last I'm going to talk about linking levels at this point, but I've got these sets of three rules. And they're linked to or group four and then I've got a set of two rules linked to or group one. Now technically the number of the or group like these could be maybe 10 or group 10, this could be or group eight, these could be or group 14 Doesn't really matter as long as like is matched with like. So going back to this presentation real quickly. standard rule logic is basically saying you have to get through one rule and this rule and that rule, or group, say, as long as you can get through one of those rules, you're still going to be able to, to complete the transaction. So if I had this link, or let me explain what these rules are doing. So this is basically saying that you have to have less than or equal to 100 people on Sunday or Saturday to make a reservation. But you can go up to 150, if it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So the initial problem here is that one rule of saying you're allowed to make this reservation, let's ignore the headcount. So you're allowed to make a reservation, if it's Sunday, or Saturday, and you're allowed to make a reservation, or your reservation, sorry, let me rephrase this, you're allowed to make reservation as long as your reservation is on Sunday or Saturday, and everything else would be a violation. And you're allowed to make reservation as long as your reservation is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, and everything else would be a violation.
Zach Malloch 16:16
So obviously, if I match this, if I make a reservation for Wednesday, it will be satisfied. But then I'm going to break this rule, I'm going to have a violation here, because it's not Saturday or Sunday. So to say that, as long as one of these two things is in effect, I'll be fine. I am linking those to the same or group. And a little rule of thumb here, you're almost exclusively not all the time, but almost all the time, your org groups will be linked to rules that have similar criteria. So this is talking about headcount. And day of the week, these are talking about the time of day, so most likely, you wouldn't have an org group, where you wouldn't have a criteria that's related to headcount and day of the week, that would cause conflict with a criteria. That's just the time of day. So that's a little hint as far as when you use or groups and how you kind of bundled them together. So what this does is it says, As long as it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday or Sunday, you'll be okay. And then it's basically just going to evaluate the headcount. So if it's 100 people, you technically would satisfy both of these rules, as far as the headcount piece goes, but you'd only be satisfying one of them. As far as the day of the week goes, if you have 101 people, and you're trying to make a reservation for Monday, well, I would fail this on both cases. But because we have the Ord group, now it's going to check this rule, it says that I am on Monday, I have 101 people. So I satisfy that rule, even though I completely failed this one, and it will still let me go through.
Zach Malloch 17:54
So the org group works as an exception here. And most of the times, that's, that's what it's doing is saying, either this or that. And that's one of the most common situations. And I would, I would say almost everybody that has, well, if you have a different registration rule for residents and a different one for non residents, then you're pretty much guaranteed to be using an org group. Because you can never be a resident and the non resident, the two are binary, so you can't be one and the other, you have to be one or the other. So we're linking the org group there. When you're, a lot of people kind of have a little concern about not knowing when they need or groups. So you know, if you're saying or, when you're explaining the rules to somebody, that's a really good indicator, you can do it like this, or you can do it like this. Another one that's maybe a little bit less obvious, is exceptions. So you can't register for more than one class, unless you own an activity membership or something like that. So the unless would be another key. Or except if or you know some of those qualifying statements, when you're talking about rules and trying to explain things to people, those would often indicate that maybe you need more group in place. So then I have this or group for link to these, these are all time of day reservations. And for these, you basically have to meet an exact specification. So it has to be an 8am to 3:30pm reservation, or it has to be a 4pm to 10pm reservation, or it has to be an 8am to 10pm reservation. And I've never have one reservation that satisfied all of those. So I need an org group. Otherwise, I get a violation for every single reservation that I make. By having these in place and linked to the same or group. They're all basically an exception to each other. And as long as one of these three timeframes is met, then I will still get through and I'll still pass through.
Zach Malloch 19:48
One of the big problems that could happen is if I had accidentally linked the same or group to all of these, basically that's just trying to say as long as one of these five rules is satisfied, I don't care about any of the other ones. So if I had a headcount of less than 100 people, I'm guaranteed to satisfy one of these two, because the max is oh is 100 for both of them. So if I had 50 people for reservation, I'd be fine. With the headcount portion of this, I'd be fine with the headcount portion of this, let's just say I'm gonna make the reservation on a Monday. So I'm satisfying this rule, and I don't care that I'm violating this rule. And then I can make a one hour reservation, I can make the reservation for any time of day, I can make it for the full day if I wanted to. And even though I'm violating these guys, because they're linked to the same org group, it doesn't care that I'm violating the other ones because I did satisfy this one. So you definitely don't want to have too many things linked to a particular workgroup, it's that that like, matching to like is really important, in kind of doing it a little bit like the so I had kind of the doors here as an example. Another way to look at it is, this is a little confusing how that is just like a flowchart. So I have this rule, or I have that rule, as long as I can get through one of those rules, I can still get the item into my shopping cart without a violation. Right. And that's, that's a trick that you can use yourselves. If you're trying to like, write it out as a flowchart. You're kind of saying, well, here's one set of criteria that I've got, here's another set of criteria. Here's another one. Here's another one, in which ones are the ones that as long as you satisfy one, you're good coming in, and which ones are separate, you have to satisfy this one independently of these others. So then that wouldn't shouldn't have the same or group as as one group here.
Bret Alarcon 21:49
Zach got time for some questions or do yes, okay. Suellen wants to know, do our groups apply in order. So for example, will or group one apply as a Screen before or group four is considered,
Zach Malloch 22:03
I've actually got kind of a nice little story attached to that. And I'll try to make it quick, because we're already close to half an hour, we'll stay, I know, I've got some extra time here. But if you don't mind sticking with us, we'll do that. And we understand if people have to drop off at 230, we always record these, we will be posting them. But that being said, we'll stick around for a little bit here. So originally, or groups were allowed to like you could make your own or groups, they were just another system code. And you could call them whenever you wanted to. So I could call this headcount or group and I could call this one time of day or group. But and I, I love our sales crew. But sometimes they're they're also fun to make fun of especially some of the people that I used to be in town. And so when we were first developing three, one, and we're working through some of this logic, we handed the the databases to them, so they could start going through some scenarios, and they can start building some demonstration situations. And what we noticed is they were creating a unique or group for every single possible case that existed. So we had one that was like, you know, kayak or group and we had one that was for campsite or groups. And the, the thing is that that made it too complicated and too confusing. So don't worry, like the the number here is just to make it a unique code, so that you know that you can match it between things, it has nothing to do with the order that anything is evaluated in. And kind of sweet. It's just going back to the spreadsheet here, there's really no evaluation of as far as order is concerned with any rules. It doesn't matter if like, if you're trying to think of this as a path to get to the shopping cart. If one of these doors stays locked, it doesn't matter which door it is that stays locked, it still will prevent you from getting to that shopping cart. Same thing, I think I had a little more direct piece here. So you have to satisfy both rules to get the shopping cart, it doesn't matter if Rule number two is failed, or if Rule number one is failed. Either failure will prevent you from getting in a shopping cart, or at least provide a violation for you a conflict message that pops up. So hopefully that helps with that piece.
Zach Malloch 24:21
Actually, I did have one more thing, and maybe this is part of that question. But I wanted to point out that disallow rules do not have an org group. You can't link an org group to a disallow rule. And if you think about the logic behind it, it actually pretty much makes sense because like, you know you, you can do this. If you match this criteria, you're not allowed to register for it. Or if you match this criteria, you're not allowed to register for it. Either one of those would provide a disciplinary, you're not allowed to do that thing. So just understand that that is not see an option in that case? Now, we can almost always get around that if it is something where you need to say, well, you know, this is a restriction. Or you can get by it, if you do this other thing, then we have some of those really fancy additional options like are not mode. So that's where we can say, well, you're allowed to do this thing as long as you are not. And then whatever criteria it was that you're going to create. And so you're basically flipping what that rule was trying to say, by the way, you're configuring the criteria, instead of flipping the allow versus the disallow piece of that. So that's another thing to be aware of. Did that seem to answer that question, Bret?
Bret Alarcon 25:43
Excuse me. So yeah, Sue Analytics, you can let us know. Or if not, we can try to answer it a little bit better. Linda wants to know, if you use or group for in this case, does that mean you can not use group four for another rule in a separate location.
Zach Malloch 25:59
Another really great point. So the thing to understand about this is when I'm doing something in global sales, it's checking the rule as I'm adding an individual item to the cart. And that's really all the evaluation that's occurring. So if I had doesn't matter how many rules I have linked to any of these other things, as I'm adding this one item to the cart, it's evaluating the rules on that item. So this is another key point that I always pointed suggests, whenever we're troubleshooting anything to do with rules or fees, is you want to go to the item that is being sold, or the item that's being reserved the thing that you select in global sales. So if I wanted to, if this was the barn that I was running into, where is it, there it is. So this is the code of facility, classic barn, the location of homeward hills, and then the actual code itself is the homeward Hills barn. So I'm going directly into that facility. And then if I look at the Rules tab, or if I look at the fees tab, on this particular facility, I know that these are the things that are being evaluated when I'm adding this particular item to the cart. And as long as the or groups work, when I'm looking at it here, then I am confident that the or groups were the rule structure, the or group structure, all of the things related to this particular item are being displayed here. So I know that they'll be what I'm dealing with when I'm actually adding it to the cart. So hopefully, that that was a really good question, though.
Bret Alarcon 27:34
Sorry I was muted, if you have a n or group at the module level, or group one, and also have an or group at the facility level, can the one at the facility level be be or group one? Or does it have to be a different number?
Zach Malloch 27:52
Well, that depends. So the the question I would answer or ask in return to that is, are you trying to provide an exception to the rule linked at the module level? Are you trying to provide a an Excel, there's another set of rules that have exceptions that don't apply to that one at the module level. So like, if I just came into, let me actually go into module management. And go into facility here. And I'm going to use or group to just so it's a little bit clearer as far as what we're doing. And I'll do capacity. Even Well, let's call it let's do minimum time in advance. And basically, I want to say not item date, but days from. So I want to say that we need to have at least 14 days before the item date. So you need to we can't make a reservation for less than two weeks before you actually want to make that reservation. And I'm going to say that this is module wide, I don't want any Facility Reservation is done. I'm going to get rid of that headcount because I chose this as that default record. So just the days from is all we're concerned about here, and I've got work group too. And this is very valid, I might put in a rule that is almost going to cover everything in the entire module. And by doing this, I'm I'm saying that, yeah, this is a rule that applies to the whole module, but I'm leaving an or group here so that I can provide an exception to it if I need to, if there are specific situations that call for that. So now I have that rule linked at my module level. If I go back to the barn, and I refresh this DataGrid. Now I've got that additional rule that just popped up here. And I can see that it's linked to or group two. So the question that was asked is basically, can I use or group to for any of the rules when I'm down here at this facility level? And the answer is yes. But you're going to provide an alternative path, you're going to basically saying that there is an exception to that This minimum time and advanced rule.
Zach Malloch 30:02
So the system, when you're putting something in the shopping cart, it's looking at all of these as being equal. It's not saying that anything's more important or less important. And it doesn't really care if the rules are linked at the module level, or the class level, or the location level, or down at the bottom facility level, it's just checking to see all the rules that you can see on this DataGrid. So it would consider this rule with exactly the same amount of weight as it was, would consider any other rule that is also linked to that or group too. So if you didn't, if you weren't sure what was happening, let's say a holiday restriction. And I don't know if this is a good thing, but you know, we'll add a holiday. And we'll just basically say that you can't make a reservation, if the reservation would, would happen and would start on one of these holidays. And I linked that as or group to just for whatever reason, this is now going to be an exception to this rule. If either of these are satisfied, then you only have to satisfy one of them, you don't have to satisfy both. And if that's not the case, that I'm wanting for wanting to happen, or if this is a, it, here's a simpler way of answering this, I think if this rule applies to this facility, and there should not be an exception, then that means effectively you should not use or group to on this facility. And with this example of this being linked at the module level, that means that probably unless you are specifically providing an exception for that minimum time and advance rule, you shouldn't use or group to for any of the other rules that you're setting up. So hopefully that I got to that simpler way of stating it, hopefully.
Bret Alarcon 31:59
And also an older question that you've might have kind of explained already. What about exceptions to rules linked at high level.
Zach Malloch 32:09
So that's actually almost exactly what we were talking about there. So this is basically the highest level, we could link a rule, this is at the module level, it affects every single thing on the facility. But let's say that this the barn for whatever reason, it's a really neat, we have a lot of cancellations that happen a little bit later on potentially like it's in demand, but we want to be able to cover last minute cancellations. So maybe for the homeward Hills barn, we actually have a situation that occurs, where we're going to allow people to make a reservation, as long as we're seven days in advance. So then this is my seventh day in advance. I love typing in front of hundreds of people. exception. And then we link this, as long as long as we link it to the group that's tied to that higher linked rule, then this will be an exception, as long as it's 14 days before the item begin date, or as long as it's more than or equal to seven days before the item event date. So if I come in nine days before an event, I would fail this rule. But because we're seeing the or group, it's going to consider this as the alternative path. And it says that as long as you more than seven, nine is more than seven, so I would be able to get through in this case.
Bret Alarcon 33:40
All right. Question going back to the Profile assignment. We have some users and problems creating the create a new Profile for the rules, can you kind of cover that, again, how you would just create a new Profile?
Zach Malloch 33:58
Yeah, so you do have to be fairly recent On three one. But basically, if you're in Profile assignments, or Profile Management, and you Click add, you know, this would be maybe my or facility module rule, fie Profile, and doesn't really matter what the description is so much. But the Type is important. So the Profile Type, he went to Aiden, just typing in our to jump down there. You can also scroll down, but the Type needs to be rules and fees. And then I'm just going to copy the code, I'm gonna use the same code as my description. And then once I hit Create, then that creates this Profile for me and it opens up these other Tabs and I can configure these in any way that I want to. Now if you're in the Profile assignment area, and you don't see the rule and V Profile here and you just clicked add, I think you're probably going to have to hit refresh on this DataGrid before you see yet. Or if it's easier for people, you can just close out of Profile assignments and then come back into it. But then you should see it under Rule and fees Type. And then you can get into the one that you just created. And once again, you can make as many as you want to depending on how many variations of it you want to use.
Bret Alarcon 35:17
Cool. I think he might have answered another question right there. Please, Heather and Sarah, if that answered your question, please let us know. Or if you have any follow up to that. Let's see, we covered that question. Gary just wants to point out in your rules and fees, you're over you're 21 and over rule was inactive. So in case you're going to do a test with that just
Zach Malloch 35:40
to be Yeah, and actually just to call that out. So I turned this off a while ago. And and that's a really good point. As far as just real quick to double, go over the statuses again, if there's a rule that you're trying to set up, and it feels like it's getting too complicated, and you're worried about, well, maybe I'm not done with it. And I don't want it to affect registrations, if somebody comes in tomorrow morning and starts trying to do something with this, you can make it inactive. And that just means the rule is not going to be checked during registrations. And actually, I'm inactivating this rule that's linked soon or group. And so basically, that's just meaning that this is now no longer a valid path to that shopping cart kind of destination that we're talking about.
Bret Alarcon 36:27
What a holiday restriction be disallow,
Zach Malloch 36:31
it certainly could be in less you need to add it to an org group, then probably it makes most sense to be a disallow, if you did have to do it as far as an org group is concerned. And once again, I would say that, we can just use the NOT mode for that. So if you need to or group you can say Allow, then we choose the item holiday. And then we just say not mode. So previously, this would be saying you're allowed to make this reservation if it's going to be on one of these holidays. And then by turning on not mode, we're just saying you're allowed to make a reservation as long as it's not on one of these holidays. And in fact, as far as rules are concerned, you as if there's one criteria, I haven't found a situation that breaks this statement. But as long as there's only one criteria, you can almost always set something up as either a disallow or an allow with the not mode, and you're basically doing exactly the same thing. Now, when you're getting into roles that have multiple criteria attached to them, then turning on the not mode for one of the criteria, but not for another part of the criteria. You can't do that with the allowed disallow switch, you kind of have to use the NOT mode at that point. But for a single criteria on a rule, you can either do allow or disallow or you can do the same exact criteria with not mode or without not mode. Hopefully that makes sense.
Bret Alarcon 38:01
Here's an older question, but I want to get to it. So I had asked about six months ago, why there was not an option to bulk link question set. Is this been developed? Can we bulk link? Sorry, we can bulk link rules and fees, but there's no drop down option for Question Sets to write about that.
Zach Malloch 38:19
So my I think it's based largely on how, how frequently something would happen. And also, like, you know, honestly, it's probably something that was considered during the initial phases of creating RecTrac. And then there's there's certainly 1000s of enhancement, literally 1000s of enhancement requests that we've received since releasing RecTrac 3.1. And those are on top of all the things from the previous versions. And we tried to incorporate as many of those as we could, but there are certain areas that we just missed those certain pieces of logic, and then trying to add it back in, you know, I'm sure that somebody put in a request for your desired for Link question sets and in bulk manner. And it's just going to be matter of priority. I think everybody's probably aware that there's been some other areas that have needed to have a little bit more higher priority put behind them as far as the development cycle goes. So yeah, unfortunately, I don't think that there's a particular reason other than it just wasn't considered earlier enough. And now it's kind of going to be waiting, its turn to be added in there.
Bret Alarcon 39:33
Thank you. Is there a way that rules can affect the way things are displayed on WebTrac as an additional rule will not display for registration?
Zach Malloch 39:44
So as far as WebTrac is concerned there. I don't believe that there's a way to hide. Well, now that I'm thinking about it, let me check our web parameters Profile. And I'm just going to go pretty quickly on this, I think we might need to table this one because it could end up being a deeper conversation. But it is related to rules. So we have these modules, search settings. And basically what these are done is it's saying how, how much detail do we want to get into as far as what information we're displaying is available on the web. So if we say none, then it's just going to display everything. And it's not going to evaluate the rules until you make a selection and try to add it to your cart and see if it's going to be available to do that. And as you can see, here, it's they're very performance related. And especially if you're an organization that has a lot of different rules, or you just have a ton of things on the web, that would result in a lot of rules being checked, then we want to stay on the none too limited side of most of these. If we went higher up like primary member, that's when you start getting to some of the areas where you can pre filter the results. But it can start to impact registration or speed as far as WebTrac refresh as far as search result, refresh. So you want to be kind of careful with it. But you could kind of play with this. One thing to point out. So it's and this is specifically about the facility module, that I'm almost always recommending people set it to none for this. With facilities, we have to create time blocks to display them on the web. And sometimes you want to give people the flexibility of starting on any half hour of the day. But maybe there's a requirement that you have a minimum of a two hour reservation. Well, if you have if you're providing like half hour increments, and you're checking the rules, before you're actually making your selections, then technically every one of those individual half hour increments would not satisfy the two hour minimum rule. So we kind of have to say don't check the rules until you're adding it to the cart. And then that allows people to pick four of those half hour increments. And then when it considers them in combination, then it's satisfying the rule and saying, Okay, you're you're meeting that two hour minimum, you're good.
Bret Alarcon 42:17
All right. Next question. If you have time, would you please be able to show how you can link registration rules, if created and set management to a season?
Zach Malloch 42:28
Sure. So set management is really great, especially if you're actually I'm going to go over one thing? Well, yeah, let's talk about sets, baby. And we got that guy right here. So you can create rule sets, fee sets and question sets. So we were talking about registration date, so happen to have registration date rule here. And I've got non resident read RecTrac, non resident WebTrac, resident RecTrac, and resident WebTrac registration dates. And, you know, so we've got the various codes here, I've got these linked to or groups, because you can never be non resident and a resident, you can never register both on RecTrac and WebTrac. At the same time, so we kind of have to have or groups for this scenario. And, you know, obviously, I'm a little bit behind on my maintenance of these items. But by creating these as a set, it just makes it so I can link these four rules to something very quickly and very efficiently. So if I save this, I didn't really change anything, but I know what that is. And if I then go to an activity, good activity management. And I could be a little bit more direct, like I could go into activity section management. But I'll start with activity management. And let's say we're going to take this rule fee testing class. And then I know that my season is linked at my section level. I'll double Click on this guy.
Zach Malloch 44:02
And so here's my spring season. And here's a little tip for using RecTrac. Anytime you see this pop out, you get the Pick list. And of course, I can come in, I can edit things here. But just as a real quick tip, if you right Click on that, you can open the maintenance tab. And that gives it as a different panel so that I can switch back and forth between things. It's not a pop up that's kind of locking me on this at one Screen. But I'm actually into management. But the question was, how do you link a set to the season so I'm in my season management, or once again, I'll close this just to kind of keep things a little slimmer. I'll just do this from the pop out. I have spring highlighted. I'm going to change it from here. And then I'm going to go to my Rules tab. And so I've got a couple of things already in place. I'm going to get rid of those just to avoid confusing the issue. And then I can link a set. And it's always worthwhile to review this linking is set as a template versus linking it as unchangeable. If I link it as a template, I'm copying, whatever I select. So I'm copying these four registration date rules, and then I can edit them independently, right here as they're linked to the spring season. If I didn't want one, I could delete one. And that's fine. So if you wanted to do this, while you're you're making kind of specific to each season, and you just want to use your sets as a starting point, excuse me, then that's completely valid. But you can also link the set as unchangeable. And that means that my registration dates are being linked here, but I can't edit. So if I try to change it, it says it's linked to a set, I can't change it here. So the benefit of this is that I'm maintaining the control at that set level.
Zach Malloch 45:59
So I've got this here, I'll just go ahead and save this. And we'll select it. So now this spring rule is attached to this activity. And I see that there are my registration date set that's now linked here. And all of those are kind of fixed, they've got the 2016 dates in them. Now, if I go back to set maintenance, because I linked it as unchangeable to the season, then if I come in and I make changes to this, any changes I make here, are going to apply everywhere. That set was linked as unchangeable, because I'm kind of maintaining that control. So I'll just make this 2021. And I'll make this 2021. And we'll save that. So that's just on one of the rules. You know, obviously, if I was doing this for full management, I would probably do it for all of those. But now if I refresh this DataGrid, like notice, these are still the 2006 teams. But that's just because I haven't refreshed it. And so now this one has updated to be 2021. So I'm maintaining control at that set level on and maintaining that sort of efficiency of changing one thing in one place and having it apply at a lot more places. I'm kind of getting that anyway, because this spring season is linked to a ton of different sections. And so any change that I make to the rules that are linked to that season will automatically affect everything that is tied to the same season. Anyway, so it's kind of double efficiency, if you want to look at it like that.
Bret Alarcon 47:31
All right, and looks like one of the last questions, what is the status of default used on are used for on a rule.
Zach Malloch 47:40
Okay, so that is actually, whenever I Click Add Rule, I get this option for adding a default record. And so defaults are basically just something that you've pre configured. So notice when I start this, I hit Continue. I've got basically everything's already in place. So if I'm going to use this youth age rule frequently, or if I want to use this as a starting point, you know, maybe this is just an age criteria. And and then in this case, I want to do adult age. So I start from that beginning point, it already has my criteria selected. And all I have to do is come in here and make some quick changes. And then I hit safe. And so by using that default record, I was able to really quickly create that. So in facility or in activities, you know, age is pretty common in facilities, date and time stuff for minimum days in advance or other pieces are pretty common. So default records, that's that's for rules and fees, you can also set that status for your facilities themselves. So if you have a Park facility, and you've set up a bunch of different things as far as the Park facility is concerned, or if you have an aquatics section and you want to use that as kind of your starting point for creating other stuff, so a lot of the things are already filled in and already in place. If you save something as a default record, then that's that's kind of like a an instant clone. You could almost think of it as a starting point to then Build something new. So if you wanted to come in and create a default aquatics class, a default senior class, a default Park facility, default gym facility, and then you kind of spread it out to your coordinators and say, go ahead and populate things. I've created some starting points for you. It can make an easier and easier beginning basically for them.
Bret Alarcon 49:34
Well, Zack, I think you answered everybodys question. Suellen and also just wants to say thank you for so much for another awesome RecChat.
Zach Malloch 49:43
Oh, very happy to help out and my my goal would be doing one of these four fees once we get into 2021. At some point, I know we have a couple of things in the hopper, and since we are wrapping up I'd also like to let everybody know that next. The next one we're going to be doing He is going to be WebTrac. Next Gen, technically, it's going to be our third RecChat chat about that. But now that we've had it out in the wild a bit, we've had some of our test users using it, we just wanted to give an update kind of on the status of that, and give people another chance to get an idea of like when it's going to be more broadly available, and how the best practices are being discovered and how we'll be distributing those. So thank you, everybody. For Bret, I'm taking your thunder you're the ones supposed to say thank you to everybody this week.
Bret Alarcon 50:29
You already took it. So
Zach Malloch 50:32
thanks, everybody, for attending. As always, it's really nice to interact with you guys. Since we don't have those in person user groups. We don't have the in person symposium this year, so stay safe out there. Stay curious, my friends, and we'll talk to you guys soon.
Bret Alarcon 50:47
Thank you, everyone.
Supporting Documents
RecChat-RulesTipsandTricks-FAQs.pdf