BAT stands for Booking and Availability Management Tools.
BAT on its own is a PHP library that provides some of the core functionality required to build a booking and availability management system.
BAT for Drupal is a wrapper and UI around BAT. It is build by the Roomify.us team to provide a foundation through which a wide range of availability management, reservation and booking use cases can be addressed. BAT for Drupal will work with both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
BAT builds on our experience with Rooms, which handles the problem of bookings specifically for the accommodation for rental use case (vacation rentals, hotels, B&B, etc). BAT is essentially a tool to allow you to build modules like Rooms and much more. It handles events with daily or down to the minute granularity.
As such, BAT is a booking and availability management framework - much in the same way that Drupal is a content management framework and Drupal Commerce is an e-commerce framework. Our aim is to build specific solutions on top of BAT to tackle specific application domains.
BAT aims to address the following tasks.
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Define bookable things. Entities that could represent anything within an application domain that have information associated with them about what state they find themselves in any given period of time. In addition, you may also need to associate pricing information related to the cost of changing the availability state of a thing over a given time (e.g. booking a hotel room for a few nights).
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Manage availability states. Bookable things will find themselves in various states (e.g. "available to book", "unavailable", "currently in use by Bruce", etc). BAT allows you to define such states and provides both GUI-based tools (e.g. interactive calendars) as well as API-based tools to change such states (because machines want to have fun too).
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Search for available things. Given a time range, a set of acceptable availability states, and an arbitrary number of other search filters BAT, should be able to answer questions such as: "BAT, is the car available to pick up from the cave at 4pm today, thanks - Robin".
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Determine cost of booking. At any given time and given state, things may have a cost to change from one state to another (e.g. go from "car sitting in cave" to "car being used by Robin". This cost for the change in state (i.e. a booking) is determined using tools that BAT provides to define what the pricing terms will be.
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