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Availability Rules

Each room can be restricted to specific days and time windows (e.g., weekdays 08:00–18:00) and to a maximum booking horizon (e.g., max 90 days ahead). Bookings outside these constraints are automatically declined with a clear email explanation.

Availability Rules (Day / Time)

Configure in the room editor under Restrict booking hours:

  1. Enable the toggle
  2. Add one or more rules:
  3. Days — pick which days of the week (Mon–Sun)
  4. From / To — time window for those days
  5. Use presets for common patterns

Presets

Preset Days Window
Weekdays 08–18 Mon–Fri 08:00–18:00
Weekdays 09–17 Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00

You can also build custom rules — for example, separate rules for weekdays (08–18) and Saturday morning (09–13).

Show / Hide Weekends

App-wide, you can toggle whether the booking calendar displays weekends — but this is a UI setting only. To prevent weekend bookings, use Availability Rules with weekday-only days. The two settings are independent.

Booking Horizon

Limit how far in advance a room can be booked:

  • 0 (default) — no limit
  • N days — bookings beyond today + N are declined

Useful for high-demand rooms to prevent speculative reservations months in advance.

How Bookings Are Evaluated

When a booking arrives, RoomVox checks (in order):

  1. Permission — user has at least Booker role on the room
  2. Availability rules — every occurrence falls inside the allowed days/times
  3. Booking horizon — every occurrence is within today + horizon days
  4. Conflict detection — no overlapping accepted/tentative bookings

A failure in any step results in a DECLINED response with an email naming the reason.

Recurring Events

Both availability rules and the booking horizon apply to every occurrence of a recurring event:

  • A weekly meeting fails if any week falls outside the availability rules
  • A weekly meeting fails if any occurrence is beyond the booking horizon
  • Infinite recurring events (no UNTIL / COUNT) are always declined when a booking horizon is set — there's no way to verify they all fit

The conflict-detection layer also expands recurrences correctly since v1.1.0 — booking the second instance of a weekly series now correctly triggers a conflict mail. Before v1.1.0, only the master event was checked, missing later-occurrence conflicts.

Email Feedback to the Organizer

When a booking is auto-declined due to availability or horizon, the email tells the organizer why so they can reschedule without guessing:

Outside Availability Hours

The room is only available Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri 09:00–17:00.

Booking Horizon Exceeded

This room can only be booked up to 60 days ahead. The earliest date that is no longer bookable: 2026-09-15.

Scheduling Conflict

Another booking exists from 14:00 to 15:30 on 2026-06-10.

See Email Notifications for the full list.

Use Cases

Office hours only

Restrict the boardroom to weekdays 09:00–17:00 to prevent after-hours bookings that would require key/lighting access.

Two-shift building

Two separate rules — weekdays 08:00–17:00, Saturday 09:00–13:00 — to allow weekend morning bookings without opening up Sunday.

Quarterly planning constraint

Set the booking horizon to 90 days on high-demand training rooms to prevent the calendar being booked solid for next year already.

Infinite recurring fence

Combine a 365-day horizon with no infinite recurrences — users who try to book a weekly meeting "indefinitely" get a clear rejection and can re-book with a 1-year UNTIL clause.

Architectural Notes

  • Availability is published as a CalDAV VAVAILABILITY object on each room's calendar, so capable clients can show the available window in their UI directly
  • Rules are stored per-room in IAppConfig (room/{roomId} → availabilityRules)
  • The booking horizon is stored as maxBookingHorizon (integer days, 0 = no limit)
  • Evaluation happens server-side in the CalDAV Scheduling Plugin — no client-side enforcement, no way to bypass

See Also