Neighbourhoods and restricting reservations

[Matt Forder]

Hoping somebody out there (I'm looking at you ServiceNow 🤔) can help me understand how Neighbourhoods can be used to restrict reservations in the Workplace Reservation 'Make a Reservation' experience.

My simple requirement is to be able create a neighbourhood that contains desks that can only be reserved by users associated with the Neighbourhood. Reading the docs pages for 'Manage Neighbourhoods' it is implied that this is possible:

Space admins and space planners can create a neighborhood and perform the following:

• Assign multiple neighborhoods to employees. An employee can be assigned to a space in a neighborhood or to the neighborhood itself. For more information, see Create a neighborhood for workplace users.
• Assign employees to a neighborhood using user assignment rules that can run on a schedule. For more information, see Execute User Assignment Rules.
• Employees can reserve a space in a neighborhood if they're part of the neighborhood or if the neighborhood isn't restricted.
• Add or remove spaces in a neighborhood.
• Add or remove users from one neighborhood to another.
• View and reserve neighborhood spaces using floor maps on the reservation portal.

The actual behaviour I'm observing in the portal:

• If 'Enabled Browse by Neighborhood' is selected in the reservable module AND
• If 'Restricted' is selected in the Neighbourhood THEN
• When the Browse by neighbourhood option is selected on the WSD Search page then the neighbourhood only appears in the list of neighbourhoods that can be selected if the user is a member of that neighbourhood, and therefore any space that is associated with the neighbourhood can't be searched/selected.

So far good... BUT... wait a minute... if the user isn't a member of the neighbourhood they can still select the Browse all option which lets them pick any space regardless of which neighbourhood it's in! And since there is no way to disable the Browse all option (happy to be corrected if I'm wrong about that) there's no way to stop them*

What am I missing or mis-understanding?

* yes, I know I could define a seperate reservable module but that seems to defeat the whole point of being able to define neighbourhoods in the first place.

[Maharechi]

Did not find an oob solution. If you have a look at the Script include WSDSearchServiceSNC, there is a variable passed called

excludeReservables. Maybe this is the key. Where this gets populated and passed I haven't found yet. It queries for 

reservableEQArr.push('sys_idNOT IN' + excludeReservables);.

I just overrode the function. 

. 

[Michael Mooter]

How did this end up working for you.  We have the situation where the space might be part of neighborhood A on Monday and Wednesday and part of Neighborhood B on Tues/Thurs/Fri and are trying to restrict teams to reserve in their designated neighborhood on their designated days

[Matt Forder]

Hi @Michael - in the end we didn't use neighbourhoods as they weren't quite giving us what we needed. We simplified our business requirements and ended up with seperate reservable modules for certain areas so we could apply different policies. In our case the areas were permanently reserved for a sub-set of staff so I don't think our solution would work for you.

[Jeff Jessie]

There is supposed to be a fix for this in the February WSD update. Exactly what it entails I am not 100% as we were unable to come up with a fix for the situation either.  Hoping after the Feb upgrade we can go back to as OOB as we can with that configuration.

[Michael Mooter]

The business requirement is currently to only allow certain groups to reserve spaces for use during specific blocks of time and a space might be in neighborhood A during one block of time and neighborhood B during another..  Hopefully the new release will cover atleast part of this