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Introduction

A great base from which to customise your bespoke rentals solution.

Features out of the box include…

  1. Checking the availability of the rentable item
  2. Disallowing rental start and end dates during live hours with control over extra payments made
  3. Control over paid locations for item collections
  4. Rentals can be enabled for minutes, hours, days, weeks or months
  5. Configurable buffers before and after every rental
  6. Configurable buffers for rentals starting from now
  7. A fully translatable interface integrated with RainLab.Translate
  8. An easily extended, October CMS design, and API.

Third-party dependencies

By default the plugin uses amazing:

  1. SweetAlert 2,
  2. Flatpickr,
  3. Select2.

Take a look at the Initbiz.LetsRentCars plugin for example extension of this plugin.

The following plugins are required
This plugin is also included into the following bundle
The following plugin extends or depends on the plugin
Creating example order

Orders

Orders can be created using the CreateOrder component as well as backend controller but there are little differences between those two. While creating order using the component, dates are strictly validated. When you create an order in the backend, dates have to be set wisely. Rentables will still be filtered by availability but dates can be set even in the past. It's just for the convenience of the employees of the rental.

Order price

In every rental office there have to define such constants:

  1. minimum period for the rental (whether it is 15 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day and so on),
  2. buffer for all rentals.

Time spans settings

For example, when we have a car rental, we would like to have a minimum period of one day and for example 2 hours of buffer between rentals to prepare cars.

Every price of the rentable models defines the price for the defined period.

In the car rental example where our minimal rental period is one day, in the rental models we give prices for one day.

To calculate the price for the rentable model, by default the Order model is running getPriceCalculatedFor method which is defined in the Rentable behavior. The method by default is multiplying the given price by the count of periods. If you want to give custom logic for the model, you can override the method in the rentable model.

Status and payment status

Payment statuses are:

  1. not_paid,
  2. paid,
  3. cash_on_delivery

Statuses are:

  1. draft,
  2. ordered,
  3. in_progress,
  4. cancelled,
  5. closed

All of them are defined in the Order model and are translated to display nicely for clients.

Additional charges

All additional charges for the order can be added using the setAdditionalCharge method. By default there are for in use:

  1. Pickup location extra paid,
  2. Return location extra paid,
  3. Pickup hour extra paid,
  4. Return hour extra paid.

Marking an order as paid

It is recommended to use the markAsPaid method from the Order model. The method will save the current date as paid_at and fire event initbiz.letsrent.markAsPaid with the order as a parameter.

Rentables

Rentables are models that can be rent using Let's rent plugin. By design, all rentable models will be attached to the order using dynamic polymorphic many to many relation and be rendered as a tab in the Orders controller.

The availability of the models for the given periods will be automatically filtered using Rentable behavior.

Registering rentables

They have to be registered in the plugin's registration file using the registerRentables method.

For example:

public function registerRentables()
{
    return [
        'cars' => [
            'class'       => 'Initbiz\LetsRentCars\Models\Car',
            'label'       => 'initbiz.letsrentcars::lang.rentables.cars_label',
            'description' => 'initbiz.letsrentcars::lang.rentables.cars_description',
            'relationConfigs' => [
                'view' => [
                    'list' => '$/initbiz/letsrentcars/models/car/view-columns.yaml',
                    'recordUrl' => '/initbiz/letsrentcars/cars/update/:id',
                ],
                'manage' => [
                    'list' => '$/initbiz/letsrentcars/models/car/view-columns.yaml',
                    'recordUrl' => '/initbiz/letsrentcars/cars/update/:id',
                    'filter' => '$/initbiz/letsrentcars/controllers/cars/config_filter.yaml',
                ]
            ]
        ]
    ];
}

By default relation's config does not have to be specified, it will get the default of the columns.yaml and fields.yaml.

In this example, there is a Car model in the Let's Rent Cars plugin that can be rented using the plugin.

Registering the model as a rentable will make a few things:

  1. extend the model to implement Rentable behavior (described below),
  2. extend the model to implement MoneyFields (Initbiz.Money) behavior,
  3. attach automatically morphToMany relation between the model and the Order model

As a consequence, the model has to have currency_id and amount columns in the database:

  1. amount - unsigned integer nullable
  2. currency_id - unsigned integer nullable

Rentable model filters

If you want to give the list of rentables ability to filter the records, you can define rentableFilters property of the model. For example:

public $rentableFilters = [
    'brand' => [
        'label' => 'initbiz.letsrentcars::lang.car.filter.brand'
    ],
];

Using the codes from the variable, the RentableList component will look for the attribute in the query string (GET) and enable them in scope if the value is proper.

For every filter you should also define method get options method like so:

public function getBrandOptions()
{
    return [
        'renault' => 'Renault',
        'audi'    => 'Audi',
        'bmw'     => 'BMW',
    ];
}

This way you will be ready for the backend dropdowns and for the filters list to be built.

Rentable behavior

Implementing the behavior will automatically define the dynamic 'price' attribute for columns amount and currency_id.

Disabled models

Rentable models can support disabling the feature.

public $supportDisabling = true;

Ensure you have a boolean is_enabled column in the model's database table.

This will make it possible to use enabled() scope on the model and automatically make disabled models invisible for queries.

Categories

Categories are meant to be used by the plugins extending Let's rent.

Category list

They are created just for the convenience of the rental office employees.

Components

RentableList

This component will render a list of rentables. The only thing you have to do is to select the rentable model from the list in the component's inspector.

By default, the list will have links with URLs to the page with RentableDetails to show the particular rentable.

Using the car rental example, using this component you can render a list of cars

The component will automatically embed the OrderInfo component and make use of it to automatically filter the list using the query string parameters.

The component also supports the AJAXly updated list of filtered elements. It will send AJAX request to onRefreshList handler which returns the filtered list of rentables and updates the partial to div#rentables-list. What is more, it will automatically set the filters in the query string as well as can load default filters from the query string.

RentableDetails

This component will inject the particular rentable object on the page.

Using the car rental example, using this component you can render details of the selected cars

RentForm

The component will render a typical rental form with such parameters:

  1. Start time,
  2. End time,
  3. Start location,
  4. End location.

Locations will be seeded from the settings and if they are extra paid than the option will have this specified in the parenthesis.

Start and end time will be set to the closest possible time by default and it will be treated as the minimum date in the frontend. If the page remembers the state of the inputs and the date is too early, the alert will be returned:

Start date alert

CreateOrder

Using this component you users can create orders. It is getting the order parameters from the query string to initially prepare order:

  1. rentable - code of the rentable being ordered,
  2. slugs - slugs of the rentables in the format slug-1,slug-2,
  3. starttime,
  4. endtime,
  5. startlocation,
  6. endlocation,

The scripts loaded by the plugin add feature to automatically send AJAX requests (to onOrderChange) on change for inputs with two classes: refreshing-field and refreshing-field-blur. They both send every field in Order[] namespace to the handler but the first one will send on every change, while the second one only when user leaves the field.

OrderInfo

The component in most cases is used by other components to prepare the order using the query string parameters.

By default it is rendering booking information of the current order, hidden inputs that keep the parameters and displays button if no order is specified.

OrderList

When the user creates order, its ID is kept in a cookie. The list of user's orders can be rendered using this component.

The component can be rendered in a few modes:

  • modal
  • dropdown
  • select input
  • list
  • button

Button mode is designed to be only a link to a page that shows a list of the orders. In this case, you should embed the component with a different mode on that page.

OrderSummary

The component renders details of the order from the URL parameter. onRun it checks if the user has access to display the order and aborts if not.

The component gives two AJAX handlers:

  1. onTransfer
  2. onCashOnDelivery

The onTransfer handler gets the orderId from POST and redirects to the paymentPage property with order ID in parameter. It is designed to process payments whatever way you want.

The onCashOnDelivery handler ensures if the user can modify the order and if so, sets payment_status to cash_on_delivery. It is meant to be used by the client who wants to inform the rental office that he/she wants to pay on delivery.

Settings

Working hours

You can specify the working hours for every weekday.

Working hours

What is more, you can forbid rentals in non-working hours or if you like enable but add the specified amount of money to the order automatically.

Locations

You can manage pick up locations from the settings and specify the amount of money to be added to the order while selecting the location.

Remember to keep the same code for multiple languages

Paid locations will render the amount in the rent form and backend controller options.

Locations

Time spans

The settings are meant to be set before making the app production-ready. They refer to the order price described at the beginning of the document.

Time spans settings

Buffer before creating order

The setting describes the time that has to lapse from the time of creating the order for the rentable models to be ready.

For example, if someone wants to create order on Monday at 8:00 a.m. for 8 hours buffer he/she will be able to do that at 4 p.m.

You can override the default behavior using the initbiz.letsrent.orderAfterDateNormalization event.

The following code will make it possible to rent something at the beginning of the next working day:

Event::listen('initbiz.letsrent.orderAfterDateNormalization', function ($order) {
    $startsAtNormalized = Session::get('initbiz.letsrent.starts_at_normalized');
    $endsAtNormalized = Session::get('initbiz.letsrent.ends_at_normalized');

    if ($startsAtNormalized || $endsAtNormalized) {
        $settings = Settings::instance();
        $closestWorkingDay = $settings->getClosestWorkingDay();
        $hours = $settings->getWorkingHours($closestWorkingDay->dayOfWeek);
        $closestOpening = Carbon::parse($closestWorkingDay->format('Y-m-d') . $hours['from']);
        $order->starts_at = $closestOpening;
        $order->ends_at = $closestOpening->modify('+' . $settings->get('count') . ' ' . $settings->get('period'));
    }
});

TODO / Future features

  1. User registration out of the box
1.0.6

Add born_at field in client and fire initbiz.letsrent.orderBeforeAdditionalCharges

Sep 24, 2020

1.0.5

Add soft deletes

May 06, 2020

1.0.4

Add zip column to clients

May 04, 2020

1.0.3

Add description to categories

May 04, 2020

1.0.2

Add nesting for categories

May 04, 2020

1.0.1

Initial table scheme

May 04, 2020