Overbooked Booking System

[beyondidiocy]

Ok ... now let's see How could I put this so almost everybody could understand ... including myself.

Here we go .... I'm currently writing a booking module and I've been asked to make sure 1001% (this is no typo 😕 ) that no overbooking should be made. and the story goes that I've made the whole thing, until I found out that it overbooks 🙁. Now I came up with two ideas that could help.

One: Safety by numbers
In this way I could show most and not all of my products, and will help give me a cushion, range or margin (whatever its called.... I don't know).

PREOBLEM::: I don't have a large number to play with so this is scrapped ....

Two: View locking
Now this might get complicated ... Depending o the number of my products I could do something like first come first view thing. In other words I could track every single session and make sure that the number of booking don't go out of hand even if there are simultaneous (this is a typo.... I think) views of my products.

PROBLEM::: it works but is it .... lets put in one word .... GOOD or is it going to pain in the --censored--

Hope you guys can help

[swr]

This is the sort of thing databases are supposed to solve. You can use your database to ensure that two bookings don't occur simultaneously.

Steps are like so:
1- Obtain lock
2- Check to make sure whatever you're selling is available
3- If it is, commit the sale. Else, report an error.
4- Release the lock

The idea being, no two clients can hold the lock at the same time, so you know that nothing is going on in the background between steps 2 and 3.

If you're using MySQL, start here:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Transactional_Commands.html