How to select from only "available" records or fields... Creating a meeting room scheduler

[Mark_McCain]

What Airtable functions can I use to create fields that allow you to select from a list of records, but only allow you to select records that haven’t been selected by other fields on the same Table?

Use: I am a meeting planner. I would like to input the names of meeting rooms that are available. I would like to be able to assign a meeting room to a record. In order to not double-book a meeting room, I would only like rooms that have not already been selected (booked) to be selectable options within a record.

My initial thinking is that I would create a Table, wherein each meeting room has its own record and that those records are referenced from another table as selectable. Perhaps a second table and links are not appropriate and it is better to create some sort of single select or multi select fields. I should mention that ideally, a single record would be able to select multiple rooms, since some of our rooms can be physically joined to create larger rooms. For example:

If Record = Meeting 1, can it have an option to Room A or both Room A and B?
If Record 2 = Meeting 2, can it have the option to select Room C, but not A or B, because those were previously selected by Meeting 1?

Cheers!

[AlliAlosa]

Hi there!

I would definitely do this across two tables: [Meetings] and [Rooms]. You could then create a view that is filtered to only show rooms that do not have a meeting assigned, and limit your record selection on the [Meetings] table to that view on the [Rooms] table.

The below link has more info on limiting your record selection to a view :slightly_smiling_face:

Airtable - Support

Linked record fields

A linked record field allows you to represent the relationships between related records by creating links between them. This is particularly helpful when you have multiple tables of related items o...

[Mark_McCain]

Thank you! Trying to test all this functionality before ProTrial expires.
Starting a new thread about Page Designer. :slightly_smiling_face:

[Queen_Registrar]

We are working on a meeting management project where participants sign up their own meetings in various rooms for time slots over a range of several days of meetings. We already have the equivalent of the [Meetings] table and the [Rooms] table and we’ve looked into limiting record selection on link records.

However, we can’t find a simple and elegant way to prevent double bookings. We’d like to limit the choice of rooms that are presented as available in the form for the participant chosen time slot in that form. Or another solution that accomplishes the same result, hopefully without users having to select from a separate form for literally every hour of a four-day conference and without users having to search through long lists of times (24 hours) for each of a fairly long list of meeting rooms (about 28).

Did you come up with a solution for basically making it possible to check availability of rooms at given times before assigning meetings to those rooms at those times?