A Kit Goes Out on One Booking at a Time

A kit is one physical case. It cannot be in two places on the same Friday, and Shelf now says so for every kit rather than most of them.

The gap

Shelf has always stopped two overlapping bookings claiming the same individually tracked asset. Kits inherited that: put a camera body in a kit and the kit became exclusive, because the body was.

A kit built entirely from quantity-tracked stock had nothing to inherit. Pooled stock is counted rather than claimed — several bookings can legitimately draw on the same pool — so a case of clamps, sandbags and cabling with no individually tracked item in it passed every check. Two overlapping bookings could each reserve it, check it out and scan it, on the web and on the phone, and no screen warned anybody.

The rule now

A kit is held by another booking when that booking is Reserved, or when it is Ongoing or Overdue and its share of the kit is still out. Trying to reserve, check out, fulfil, extend, or scan the kit onto a second overlapping booking is refused, and the refusal names the kits:

Cannot reserve booking. Some kits are already booked or checked out for an overlapping period: Projector case A. Please remove them and try again.

Before anyone gets that far, the kit shows "Already booked" in the Manage kits picker and on its row inside a booking.

An asset removed from a kit after a booking was made does not hold the kit. It carries on as a standalone item on that booking, which is what it now is.

One gap stays open on purpose. Adding a kit to a booking that is already Reserved does not run the check — the clash surfaces later, at check-out, fulfil, extend or scan. Single assets behave the same way when added to a reserved booking, so it is one question for all of them rather than a kit-specific hole.

Nothing that already exists is broken by this. Every overlapping pair in production today involves a mixed kit, which the asset-level check already refused, so no booking becomes stuck that was not stuck before.

A badge that was never telling the truth

The same round fixed a red herring next to it. A quantity-tracked asset supplied by a kit was being measured against the loose pool — the part no kit has claimed — and marked Insufficient stock when that part was empty. But a kit member does not draw on the loose pool; its units come out of the kit's own slice, which is exactly what was subtracted to produce that figure.

The effect was a projector case whose remote and clamps all live inside kits lighting up red on every pooled member, while reserving and checking that booking out worked perfectly. The check-out guard was right and the badge was wrong.

Rows a kit put on a booking now carry no stock badge at all, red or amber, on the booking list and in the assets sidebar. A member later removed from its kit goes back to the loose pool and is measured there like anything else.