Blocking a location also cancels the already registered reservations. Can the canceling be avoided?

[Werner1]

Hello all

Creating a Block Location record for a room (in the sn_wsd_core_block_location table) will remove that room from the available selection list on the ServiceNow portal page for new reservations during the specified period.

At the same time, reservations that were already made for that blocked period are automatically canceled.

Question: Is it possible to avoid canceling those already made reservations or to delay their cancellation?

The reason is that we prefer to offer individuals the opportunity to reschedule their reservation before the reservation is canceled.

Thank you for any assistance.

Werner

[Raj_Esh]

Hey @Werner1 

I am curious to know your exact use case here. Are you talking about the preparation time and cleaning up time blocking a location? Because we do have the logic in place. I am just wondering your about exact user case.

Example: If I have booked a meeting room(ABC) for 19:30 to 20:30 with extra services which has 15minutes  (preparation and clean up time for each). Systematically it books the room 19.15 to 20:45. 

If someone else try's to book the same meeting room(ABC) for 19:15 or 19:30, ABC Meeting should not be visible on the portal until 20:45. 

Thanks,

Raj

[Werner1]

Hello Raj_Esh

My use case is not exactly the same and looks like this (in italic) :

To prevent a room from being available for reservation during a specific period, you can create a "Block Location" record in the sn_wsd_core_block_location table. Consequently:
1) The room will not appear in the list of selectable rooms for new reservations on the ServiceNow portal page.
2) Concurrently, any existing reservations for that room are automatically canceled.
My question: Is there a way to bypass or postpone the cancellation process of already made reservations? The aim is to give individuals the chance to reschedule their reservation before it gets canceled.

As it was pretty important for our company, I also registered a case on the ServiceNow Support.

See the answer of ServiceNow support in italic:

There does not seem to be an Out of box way to avoid or postpone the cancellation process, however it's quiet likely that this could be achieved in some manner via a customization on your instance.

We took a look at the configuration of this functionality and confirmed that this process is triggered by a business rule, which in turn actions a script include in order to check for existing reservations and cancel if so.
- Business Rule: 'Block Location Validation'
- Script include: 'WPBlockLocationUtilsSNC'
The script include above is 'read-only' protected, so any customizations to this logic would need to be done on the 'un-protected' script include 'WPBlockLocationUtils'.
As mentioned we are unable to advise on any customizations as it is out of our scope for support, however if were to start looking at customizing this logic on the instance I would start with the above properties.

Our workaround for now:

We will only create the 'Block location record' the day before a room will be blocked.
Before blocking the room, we send an email to warn the reservation-organizer. In that way they have the time to reschedule, cancel or whatever their reservation.

Kind regards

Werner