Database Projects/5e - Professor Jerry Post

Room
Start Date, Time
End Date, Time
Purpose
Anticipated number of people
Person Priority Level
Account number for charges
Date Made
Person
Proxy
Item Quantity Charge
Total item charges
Room charge
Total billed
Figure 3
Project Descriptions
set up the room before a meeting, that extra hour should be used to move up the
start time. The individual making the reservation is responsible for determining
the specific time requirements, but it would be helpful if the room descriptions
included some time estimates for basic tasks.
To track who actually made the reservation, the system should record the person
making the reservation—who might be a proxy. And it must track who is
actually going to use the room (e.g., the responsible executive). The purpose is
basically a short description that can be posted online so other people know how
the room is being used. For instance, even though the president has higher priority
than a marketing manager, the president might choose not to override a meeting
scheduled with key customers.
A person can enter a priority level for the room reservation. This priority can
be anything from that person’s level or lower. For example, a top executive might
reserve a room to use for rehearsing a presentation and assign a lower priority in
case someone else needs the room.
You should also think about what to do if a reservation is overridden and replaced
with a higher-priority event. In particular, you might want to keep the
original reservation and flag it instead of deleting it. Then, if the new meeting is
canceled for some reason, you could contact the original person who reserved the
room and ask if it should be rescheduled.
Remember that concurrent access could be a significant problem. You do not
want to allow two people to reserve the same room at the same time. Web systems
typically use optimistic concurrency, but you might want to think about building
some type of pessimistic locking. For instance, you might temporarily lock out
a room when one person starts making a reservation for it, so that others cannot
even start a reservation of that room at the same time. It would be frustrating for a
user to go through all of the steps to reserve a room only to find that someone else
was faster and had just reserved the room.
41