Overview

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To retrieve online reservations and update online availability information, go to Reservations / Retrieve Online Reservations. Of course you will first need to have everything set up appropriately first -- refer to Maintenance / Online Setup for complete details.

Retrieving and processing online requests generally requires a few steps:

1. Select the desired Source (only sources you've enabled will be shown, and thus there may only be one source option).

2. Retrieve Online Requests -- This will go online to retrieve any new requests from the selected source. All requests retrieved will be displayed in the list.

3. View / Process Request Details -- You will need to open each request, perform any necessary functions like selecting a site, entering the deposit, etc., and then Save it.

4. Upload Site Availability -- Whether or not there are any new requests, you can upload the current availability information to the Internet.

If you're set up for more than one source (e.g. E-mail and Webervations), you can repeat the steps above for each source.

Note that the operator access level required to retrieve and process requests is Manager by default, but it can be modified through Maintenance / Park Setup / Access Levels.


Miscellaneous Functions

The main processing functions listed above are described in sections following this one, but there are a few other functions available on the main Online Reservation Requests dialog.


Paste & Process Request Text

This function can be used to manually process requests that can't be retrieved directly, or for testing. For instance, if the only E-mail account you have is through America Online, then E-mail requests can't be retrieved automatically. You will need to copy the request from the America Online E-mail window, then use this function to paste it into a processing window. The processing will proceed just as if it was retrieved directly, e.g. the parsing rules will be applied to extract the data from the text.

Note that you may need to get the complete "source" text and paste it, including the E-mail header information, for requests to parse correctly. The "Message-ID" part of the header is used as the default Online Request ID, so unless your parsing rules extract another value for this unique ID, the E-mail header must be included. For America Online, you need to use the "View Message Source" function to get the complete raw message text with the header (this may be in various places depending on the AOL version, but it's commonly under the "Actions" menu when viewing a message).


Re-process Downloaded Requests

When requests are downloaded from the source, they are placed in a local file (this helps avoid accidental deletion, since they may be removed from the source as soon as they're retrieved). When you use this re-process function, it will read the file with the previously retrieved data and parse the requests already in it, instead of going online to get new requests. Since all downloaded requests are actually appended to any previous requests in the file, you could potentially accumulate requests indefinitely into the same file. (See the Delete function below to clear the file.)

Re-processing requests won't be necessary under normal conditions, but it's likely to come in very handy while getting started and tweaking your setup. You can simply use this function to read requests from the file, which will of course be faster than downloading them, and it will also grab previous requests that may have already been deleted form the server. Don't worry about creating duplicate reservations, though -- once a request is processed and Saved, its Online ID is stored so can't be processed again. Any of these prior requests that you've saved will be indicated as such in the list.


Delete all Downloaded Requests

Once you're sure that all downloaded requests have been processed (Saved or Ignored as appropriate), you may want to delete the downloaded requests. While deleting them is technically not necessary, this will "clear the clutter" in the temporary files used for storing the downloaded requests. It will also speed up processing (or at least re-processing) of future requests. Of course it will not delete any Saved reservations, since those are already recorded in your database.

Note that this is completely separate from deleting requests from the server (e.g. the POP3 mailbox, or the Webervations pending requests queue). You will generally want to have Campground Master delete them from the server automatically each time they're retrieved to avoid excess accumulation there. See the Online Setup section for the option to delete requests from the server.



Further Topics:

Downloading Requests

Processing Requests

Online Request Details

Uploading Site Availability Data

Exporting to Web Vacancy Grids

Sample Javascript to Insert Form Values

Sample Web Reservation Form

Online Reservations Setup

Online Reservations Overview

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