First of all, I’m not sure if this is a feature request or if I’m simply missing the solution. Since I suspect it’s the latter, I’ll post here.
I use Baserow frequently and really enjoy it, but there’s one feature I greatly miss: the ability to check availability for a given time period and thereby prevent double bookings of resources.
For example, in a simple hotel room management system, there are two tables: Rooms and Reservations. The Rooms table contains all the important details about each room (such as name, number of beds, etc.). The Reservations table links to the Rooms and defines two date fields: ‘from’ and ‘to.’ I would like to have a formula field in the Reservations table that shows whether there is already a booking for the selected reservation period.
The main goal is to use Baserow to track scheduling overlaps and prevent double bookings.
I would appreciate any tips on how to achieve this functionality. I’m also open to other approaches for tracking reservations and preventing double bookings. For me, this would be the icing on the cake, turning Baserow from a very good tool into a perfect one.
Checking for overlap in dates and time is a use case that occurs on a regular base. It is hard to solve this purely in the database since most scheduling applications handle this in a web application.
In Baserow, you can use the application builder for this. If someone wants to make a reservation, you can create a data source that checks for other reservations that overlaps with the date. The downside is that you always manually need to do a check before you can confirm the booking.
A different approach is working with automations.
Create a table in Baserow that holds all the days of 2024 (and 2025). We already have such a table in our OOO Management template.
Use an automation tool like Zapier, Make or N8N. Create a webhook in this tool that is triggered when a new reservation is made. Check in the automation tool is the room is still available for that period and add the reservation by updating the table that holds the dates
The last possibility is the timeline view that will be part of one of the upcoming releases. Such a view makes it possible to directly see for which periods rooms are already reserved.