In addition to adding certain disabled times in the Week Schedules, it is possible to create synthetic Appointments as "Blocking Appointments".
These Appointments are not made for serving a Customer, but are instead made to indicate that the time slot is occupied.
Blocking Appointments will only affect the Public Booking API. Bookings via the Calendar client will still be possible, as that one allows multiple bookings per time slot.
The main difference between doing this via a Blocking Appointment and setting it in the Week Schedule is that the Week Schedule always blocks out those slots, for all weeks in the future, whereas a Blocking Appointment will only block that time for the specific day.
A Blocking Appointment is defined as having a status of > 999 or the blocking flag set to true.
Three kinds of blocks can be made:
• A Blocking Appointment that has no Branch set - this will block all resources across all Branches for that specific time period.
• A Blocking Appointment that has Branch, but not resource, set - this will block all resources for the specified Branch for that specific time period.
• A Blocking Appointment that has Branch and resource set - this will block the particular resource for that specific time period.
Note that if the resource is tied to multiple Branches (see sections on Appointment Profiles and Resource Groups) it will still be blocked in all Branches.
Blocking Appointments can be done on resource level through the Calendar client application.
For blocks on Branch or Global level, the Calendar API must be used, please see the SDK documentation.
Blocking Appointments will never be sent to central Orchestra, so they will not be able to be used for e.g. creating Visits and similar.
Their primary function is to allow more fine-grained control of resource availability.
Note that if the resource is tied to multiple Branches (see sections on Appointment Profiles and Resource Groups) it will still be blocked in all Branches.