Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Senior Support Specialist, Seth Warren, and Support Specialist, Daniel Rotondi to discuss some new features related to WebTrac Rules. The group touches on Web Event Management, the new registration event feature, and adding custom rule definitions.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:00
Hi and welcome to RecChat. Today is Thursday the 15th. I usually don't introduce the day, but today I did. We're joined by Daniel Rotondi and Seth Warren here. Unfortunately, Bret is out with a sick kid. Hopefully, the kid is improving and Brett is surviving the experience with aplomb. Trying to do this with aplomb is my challenge. So what does he normally say? Yes. If you have any questions during today's session, go ahead and hit that q&a area. If you have any general feedback, ask in the chat. And we will try to respond to that. And answer any questions that you've got. And I haven't even talked about the topic today that you might ask questions about. And that is, of course, some of our upcoming WebTrac improvements, and one that's already here. And technically, they're both kind of already here. But it depends on what Build you're on and all that. And what am I talking about? Anyway, let's just go ahead and share the Screen started. How's it going today? Dan? How's it going today? Sir?
Daniel Rotondi 1:08
It's going good. How about you Zach?
Zach Malloch 1:10
Oh, yeah. Trying to stay on top of thing.
Seth Warren 1:14
That's good.
Zach Malloch 1:16
Can you guys see my Screen? All right here?
Seth Warren 1:18
Oh, yeah. That's great.
Zach Malloch 1:20
Awesome. So this is, this is cutting edge. In fact, I just updated, I actually just logged out, which was not in exactly what I was trying to do. I was trying to show off that I updated to 3.1 dot 10 dot 13. I'm sure I'm missing a couple of zeros in there somewhere. But anyway, it's our latest version, I believe we actually pulled it off of the website from the initial release. But when it is released, which will be soon, you will have access to both of these features. The first one, anybody on and actually, let's just double check the the numbering 3.1 point 10 point 12. Anybody on that version will have access to this first thing I'm going to talk about, and that is the web registration event. So probably not a ton of people are going into WebTrac event management. So just to kind of like set the stage, why would we even go to WebTrac Event Management? Well, let me bring up WebTrac. There we go. And we have this little guy, the event calendar. And the event calendar hangs out here, a lot of people actually probably turned it off when we initially opened it up. Because it was kind of unwieldy had everything in this one place. There wasn't really an easy way to filter it down so that you're only seeing certain things and it's a combination of all your activities, potentially your facility reservations, your ticketed events and everything. And so you can imagine that this would get kind of busy. And you know, when you Click on a day, you only can really see three things and then you start scrolling or even if you zoom into it, you have kind of these little lines. But you know, that just a dense Field of tons of these lines doesn't really help necessarily. All this to be said that you probably aren't going into the WebTrac event maintenance piece or management piece to create your own kind of one off events. This would be if you're creating an event that's for something that you're not necessarily creating an activity for, like we have an event at the park show up if you want to don't show up if you don't want to you don't have to register at all, but we want to show it on the event calendar. So that's the main reason you would have gone to this web event management before. You just Click Add, you'd fill all this out. And that sort of web event, you can tell it where it's going to happen, you can give it a category if you want to report on it. And you can give all the details that you want to as far as what this event would be. And then when you hover over it or Click on it here, you can get into that, you can see all of these comments, these are HTML enabled. So you can throw in links and stuff here so people could get to other sites if they needed to.
Zach Malloch 4:01
But now we have this extra piece, which is a registration event. And the idea here is that this is ideally going to simplify the way that you set up registration event rules for all of your activities. So if I have something defined as a registration event, I'm actually going to jump into the one that I already have. Once again, you need to be on 3.1 point 10 point 12. The bill doesn't matter after that as long as you're on dot 12 something then you should have this registration event as an option when you go to your WebTrac event updates. What this does is allows you to put forth a date and time that you want this activity to be available for registration. And then you can put in specific details about what sort of notes you want to give to your customers. In you know this is very similar to the rules that we have in place except our rules would say something like residents cannot Register, beginning date equals 1001 22. And time equals, you know, it'd be more kind of technically defined. And we can get put in this plain tax. But you know, we wanted to if you wanted to say, basically what's going to happen, actually, I should show you when this is going to occur is when we get to an activity search. And I just need to apply some criteria. So this actually, this one search filter required, I'm sure some of you saw that starting to pop up. This is all kind of geared towards making WebTrac, a more performative software. Last couple of years, we've had some people have some issues where people were running into performance lags when they're doing registrations, and you know, when you get real heavy initial registration push, you can sometimes get a little bit caught out, and the server struggles to keep up with it. So we're doing extra things. So every time we process a search here, it's doing a lot of things on the back end, it's it's weighing down the server and making it do a lot. I don't mean, they can make things happen so that you're not getting as many results, you have to have at least one criteria, you're not getting all activities as a search result, you need to filter it down. And then the web events. So normally, we'd hover over and we'd see like, Well, why is this unavailable? Why can't we add it to our cart necessarily. And we have all these different kind of canned messages. In my case, because it's not an active, you know, real time live database, I have a lot of old stuff kind of showing up here. So what I could do is go into this Full Moon canoe, I'll just clone it. So I have a modern event for this. And let's just go straight to Section management, because that will also tie into this as well. But I want to kind of show what happens. That was a full moon,
Seth Warren 6:55
I think so
Zach Malloch 6:56
there you go. We'll just clone that. And we'll make it for the beginning of October. So that it's in the future. I'll just say it's fall for 2022. And there we go.
Seth Warren 7:14
There's the fall breeze in the air today.
Zach Malloch 7:16
Now this is an exact duplicate, I'll just go in here real quick. And I'll update this to be sometime in the future in October. And I always forget that when I'm editing in the DataGrid, you have to edit the ends date first, and then come in and edit the beginning date. Otherwise, it doesn't really like it because it tries to save as you go and you're trying to save a beginning date that is technically after the end date if you're doing it in that direction. So we've got that one edited and saved. And now if I go to WebTrac, right here, and refresh my search, it might be a minute or so lag. Before that pops up. I do have a search index builder running through. And I should actually double check and make sure my scheduled events are running because I did literally just run this update as we were in our countdown. When we realized the second piece that I wanted to show everybody today was actually not in 12. It was in 13. So it seems like things are running. So we'll just there's our search indexer just ran. So let's just refresh this one more time
Seth Warren 8:25
Hey Zach can you hear me?
Zach Malloch 8:36
it's gonna throw a little wrench. And if and I can't show anything. Just jump into this again, make sure there's nothing that is turning off. Technically, it should be a Friday rather than the Thursday should set to display. Well, while we're waiting for this to index, and we'll kind of hope that it does eventually do it. This is the new Field that actually exists on activity section management. So the registration web event. So if we pull this up, we'll be able to pull from any of the events that we have created that are specifically the event Type of registration event and not web event. So now if I link this here, that's when the magic starts to happen. But I do I do really want to show kind of the before and the after. With this. We'll see if we can get this to pop up on display yet. Just relaunched the whole activity search
Zach Malloch 9:42
there we go. All right. So now it's just available to add because I don't have any rules necessarily preventing that from being available. But let's say that we do want to have this pull into that web registration event piece. And we basically want to say that this event is not going to be available to register for until the first of October. So we could certainly put in rules for all of this. But what the red web registration event does is it actually saves us a lot of that rule checking, which saves server performance. And it also gives us the benefit of being able to customize exactly what display we would want it to show off now. Now we're back to only showing the two of them go back. Dan, and Seth, are you guys aware of that? Changing? What would show up as a search? I mean, it should be available right. Now, all right, I mean, it should show yeah, here we go. Now it's working, it was just able to bathe now. There's something going on. So now we get this message. resident registration begins on this date, non registered and resident registration begins in this other date. But now we can also customize exactly what that means. So you can say our most humble, deepest apologies. But, you know, just to put a little bit of ceremony into it, we save that description. All of this might have about 55 seconds of lag. But no, it's already there. Most fumbles and deepest apologies for resident resident registration begins on this date, non registration begins on this other date. And so that will, that kind of plays in with a scheduled event called the WebTrac availability update, which is right down here, this should be popped up in everybody's scheduled events. But this should be running every 55 seconds or so. And it basically just goes through and sees if anything should be flagged to turn on to make it available for registration or turn it off to make it unavailable for registration based on these registration events. Now, guys, I saw a couple of questions pop up. Are those anything that would be useful to bring up for the whole group?
Seth Warren 11:59
Yes Zach. Can you hear me Okay?
Zach Malloch 12:02
Yes, we can.
Seth Warren 12:03
Okay. So there were two questions from the poll here. The first one was kind of going back a little bit to when we're showing the events, the event calendar, back in the beginning, but I just want to make sure it gets answered here. So her first question was, do all customers have the ability to view calendar mode for events? Or would we as an organization had to set the calendar view for them? And I think she's referring to a customer's ability on WebTrac to be able to see that web calendar that you showed there in the beginning.
Zach Malloch 12:35
Sure. Yeah. So this is all based on WebTrac menu management. So if you have removed that, at some point in the past, if I bring up WebTrac, I just Type start typing WebTrac. It's one of our four options that start with WebTrac. So WebTrac, menu management right there. When you create a Next Gen menu, then you have the Next Gen default. And you have well actually, I think I'm going to add it back here, because I should have, yeah, so you have either the Account menu or the Next Gen default menu. And so those will refer to whether you're talking about this menu over here, or this menu that shows up. Once you've logged in, so I'll just log in as one of my test households here. Just to display that urge to demonstrate that now this is its own drop down menu. Regardless of which one, you'd be looking at the default menu, in this case, not the My Account menu. And it's just the event calendar. Now, by default, that is a tab itself. But if we go in here, and we look for event, there's our event calendar Button. I mean, it's in here as a Tabs, we can you can drag it over if you doesn't exist. Now, I didn't see Nicole's second question there. So you're gonna think that this one?
Seth Warren 13:59
Oh, no, I think that I think that answered that fine. If it didn't, Nicole, let us know, please. But I think that I think that does a good job of answering that for sure. So yeah, we've got Nicole's second question. And then we also have a question from Laurie, too, that I think would be good for us to talk about here too. Oh, yeah, I can read Nicole's question out loud. I'm sorry. The cynical second question was, if I have 2200 activities that have the same registration date, I should add registration event Under WebTrac Settings on Section management for every activity. Hopefully this can be done via bulk change if the answer is yes.
Zach Malloch 14:40
And so no, you have to do it individually for now. You can absolutely do this in bulk change. So I think if we just look for this
Daniel Rotondi 14:50
registration event
Zach Malloch 14:52
registration event right there is what we have. So we add that and then we have our drop down. It's the same exact list so only will display They have things that are actually defined as registration events. And then this registration event event will get applied to anything that we have selected up here in the top DataGrid. So you can do this by season, you can do it by begin date, you can filter this in all sorts of different ways. And then you can even go up to Options, you can go to select all rows. And then if I hit processable, change, all 198 of my activities would have this registration event attached to them. So you're absolutely able to change, Nicole, we wouldn't make you do that manually.
Daniel Rotondi 15:36
So Zack, once you have that registration event on all of your sections, Laurie wants to know, how does this registration event work in tandem with rules and rule criteria?
Zach Malloch 15:47
Yeah, so, Seth, I think in this point, you and maybe you as well, Dan might have a little bit better understanding of the actual, very specific mechanics. But my understanding is that during the timeframe of the web event, it's basically defaulting to anything that is before this date, it's just going to display that you're not available to register for that activity. When you're between these dates, I believe it shows that it is available, but then it's going to check the registration rules to see if it's if it applies to the resident or the non resident. So until that registration date actually comes up. RecTrac is not even spending any server resource to run through any of those rule checks. But then, during that period is when it will do so go ahead.
Seth Warren 16:35
No, I was I was just gonna say I think you're completely right on that, Zach, you know, the, the idea being is that if you're using the web event, it should cut down the number of rules that you have to have on some of these on somebody's activities, or items that you're selling on WebTrac. Just because every time WebTrac goes to load a search page or load a page in general, it has to it has to go through and check all of these rules before those before it's able to load. And so if you're able to not have some of those rules on there, because you're using the web registration event here, then it'll help. It'll help some of that response time in terms of the webpage loading in general. But if you are in between the dates of the event, and you do have rules, it still is checking those rules. It's just saying that if you have a date, like a date and time rule that saying don't sell the item before, you know, October 1 2022, you know, and then you're also using that it's it's kind of redundant, you don't really have to have the rule if you're using if you're using the web event here for that.
Zach Malloch 17:40
Yeah. And actually, that's a good question. So we'll come to John's question in a second. But Mary was asking, so should the end date be set for the end of the session or just anytime after registration starts? And I believe it should be set for the entire timeframe that people can register for those activities?
Seth Warren 18:02
Yep, I agree. So it shouldn't just be shouldn't just be the day that the registration starts, it should be throughout the the length of the registration period. So you know that your follow your followed registrations are going to run from, you know, August 1 through, you know, September 15, for what have you, I would have those as your, you know, your start time and end time just to cover the length of that registration period in general.
Zach Malloch 18:29
And it's, I'm kind of anticipating a follow up question to that, which would basically be well, what if people can register throughout the session, like until it ends and your sessions all in the different dates and the like? And I think in that case, you would have your ending date be like the entire span of that timeframe? And you're basically just saying, When can you try to register for these activities? And once again, it will check the rules. So now we can kind of talk to John's question, which is, if you already have rules on the activities, is there an easy way to remove those from our sections, there is an easy way to remove them, we can do it through bulk changes. But there are cases where you would still want rules. You might not want the specific date and time especially for residents. If residents are the only ones like if the registration date starts and residents can register from that point onward, then maybe you don't need a resident registration date rule but if for non residents can register after that, but not immediately. You would want it to check for non residents. And same thing if there are age criteria, if there's membership requirements, anything like that you still want to have those rules in place. Hopefully I'm saying all that accurately. Please. See. I think you are okay. I did want to really briefly show the next piece and this will kind of come as a coming attraction. There might be a handful of you guys out there that have of ten.or 3.1 dot 10 dot 13. But it was pulled, so it is probably going to be the next one that you download.
Zach Malloch 20:09
But if we go to our activity section management, and we take a look at in this is any rules tab really at this point. But we can jump over here and we look at this DataGrid. And this already shows us that now there's this new Field called the custom rule display. And so I'll just add a rule that I'm going to link directly right here, and we can see here is our custom rule display Field, we can see that this is basically just here to clarify things to your customers. So once again, a lot of times we are very technical with explaining why a rule isn't working by displaying the criteria that exists, what we calculated and explaining that well, now that's not going to match up between those two things. Frequently, that's not super easy to understand for your customers. Like the fact that you're including like your age must be under 15.99 doesn't mean anything to a customer and can end up being really confusing, because the standard, there's no standards of using decimal points for ages in our society that I know of. But so in this case, you can say so 14 to 16 age for reservation, like that's my really basic rule description. If I violated this rule, it would say your age older than or equal age must be older than or equal to zero and younger than equal to 13.99. The calculated date is whatever and blah, blah, blah, calculated, ages, whatever, and it's a very long line. But if you just wanted to say you must be between 14 and 16. Two make a reservation, then we are displaying that much more easily. Your customers are reading it much more easily. And it's also reducing the amount of work that we have to do to translate our criteria into the explanation of why you don't match those criteria. So it's another performance benefit for your customers or for you as well as you know, making it easy for your customers. So should make WebTrac run better, and make it easier to understand. So that's that's our double win right there. And I see that Maureen is pretty excited about that already. That's awesome. Those are the two main pieces that I wanted to talk about. You know, this is a very, very brief overview of this, I believe that our products, our director of product management, Bryan Gillilan, is intending on jumping onto one of these RecTrac RecChat chats with us and giving a bigger overview of some of those things. And you can definitely expect him to be showing off some neat things at the the upcoming symposium here in Vermont in October for those of you that were lucky enough to register for that, for anybody that wasn't able to register for it, we're coming back bigger and better next year, fingers crossed. We had enough interest this year to already decide that we're going to do it again next year. So hopefully, that answers questions. I don't see anything open at the moment. Any final thoughts from you guys Seth and Dan?
Seth Warren 23:20
Just really excited to be able to use it. I mean, I think that from you know, from a customer standpoint, sometimes those criteria can be, you know, maybe a little hard to understand, you know, for you know, for even if you use RecTrac Nevermind for your patrons that might be using a site and not understanding why you know, and or group rule has got this convoluted language, you know, that's popping up when I can't register for something. So I think it'll be really nice for, for our customers patrons to to be able to see a clear message, you know, lit tools that way.
Daniel Rotondi 23:56
Just to Build off of that I know coming from like a support and troubleshooting standpoint.
Zach Malloch 24:01
I can't hear Dan, can you can you guys hear me? Oh, I can't. Yeah, it's me.
Daniel Rotondi 24:07
Well, I'm just coming from a support standpoint, I know, you know, when you have some complex rule violations, and when you're kind of creating a new rule and you're trying to assess how the criteria is going to evaluate, you know, sometimes I was just saying this to you this morning Seth that like I like to read it out loud. And you know, make sure I have an understanding on how this rule is going to evaluate kind of before I push it into the live environment, you know, during my testing and I think adding this custom rule display not only helps your, your patrons, you know, make understand the rule that you're displaying for them. But it also kind of helps you kind of reaffirm you know what you just set up with the criteria. If you can sum it up in a custom Rule Description, then you know, you'll you'll have a better understanding on how it's going to operate and verify by that this rule is going to do what you're intending it to do. And along the lines with the web registration events, you know, I think it's a it's a bigger push, like you said, Zack to make everything run smoother during these events and have a lighter load on your your server resources. So I'm happy to see both of these improvements.
Zach Malloch 25:24
I did see a question pop up from Jamie, I'm not sure if that's what you're going to address.
Seth Warren 25:28
It is. Jamie would just like to know if the custom role display shows for RecTrac users to or if it's just WebTrac users. So I would imagine where you run into a rule violation and trying to purchase something within RecTrac. And I, I would like to say that it wouldn't, but I don't
Zach Malloch 25:46
is web only for the corruption. And there is a kind of a reason for that. So your rule description will show up when you make a RecTrac rule violation here, in addition to the criteria violation, so you can kind of use your rule description as that display, it's just going to come in in addition to the violation on the criteria. So that's kind of about where you're directing your staff to read. Actually fine, save this. I think if I jump into global sales, I can create that violation real quick, just to show what I'm talking about. And then I see Maureen had a question about whether this is available in the Rental module. And yes, it absolutely is. It's as far as I know, it's been added to everywhere you see rules. So every linking level.
Seth Warren 26:37
But then this, but then this I can't remember if he said it or not sec. So I apologize if I'm repeating it. But then this feature itself isn't available until I think it's three 110 13 Oh, oh, or oh one where like the web event management we were looking at earlier was on three 110 12? One?
Zach Malloch 26:59
Correct. Maybe I hadn't seen. So this outside headed is disallowed, and make it an allow rule.
Zach Malloch 27:11
So now, if I go to sell this should get a violation. Yep. So here, this description, you can see that kind of the plain text the simpler way of describing it. And then you see the larger element. And this is where I think you were saying, Dan, I'm sorry, I was looking for something else while you're giving this explanation. But sometimes when you're testing it, it's maybe better to test it without the custom rule display on the web. I mean, you can do it in person here, and you won't have to worry about it. But if you do it on the web, and you add it to your cart, then you can see exactly why you're not being able to get into it. And then you can put in a custom display. Once you're happy with the way it's working, just make it make more sense. But yeah, if I went into this activity, and I just said, Well, this is what I want it to say, while a copy this, I'll paste it into that description Field, I'll hit Save. And then when I go to global sales, and add that to the cart, I should have selected my person first who would get the violation. But here we go. So you must be between 14 and 16 to make a reservation. So it's just kind of telling your your customers where to look or your sorry, your staff where to look to see that simpler description on the rule. This replaces the criteria piece on the web. So that's kind of a difference between RecTrac and WebTrac. With those pieces once again, coming out in 3.1 point 10 point 13. Probably Oh, two at this point.
Seth Warren 28:41
Probably.
Zach Malloch 28:42
Yeah. All right. I think that that's it. I don't see any other questions. I didn't notice anything coming through chat. So hopefully I'm not missing anything here. I don't believe so. We're good. Lori's asking if we have an estimate of 13 is coming out. I know that they're working on it actively. I've seen a little bit of back and forth. It will be soon. Before October, I'm fairly confident with saying because we're going to most likely be aiming for getting 14 out in October. The Yeah, I would guess probably next week for probably, nope, no promises. But that's my thought. Okay. All right. Well, I think that that's it. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing and we'll wrap things up there. Stop Sharing. There's the Button now it's working. Now I'm going to hit the end Button. And there's always a little bit of lag here. So I'll just wave and then keep waving as i
Seth Warren 29:41
Thanks, everyone.
Zach Malloch 29:42
All right. Bye, everybody.
Daniel Rotondi 29:43
Take care.
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