If you have a seated product that has a seating plan based on a layout, and you have made custom alterations to the seating plan of the original product, when you copy & paste that product, would you expect:
The new product has a fresh copy of the original layout. The changes I made were to allocations such as company and press holds, and those only apply to one performance. I wouldn’t expect the holds to be copied over any more than I’d expect seats that had been sold on the original to be sold on the copy. Also, I changed the price bands of a few seats because we were selling well, and I wanted to maximise my revenue, but that’s just a one-off change.
The new product has an exact copy of the seating plan of the old product, including any seats I altered. The changes I made were to block out the front row that’s not available for this show, and I didn’t want to bother making a new layout for the purpose, I just wanted to amend a product and copy it.
I prefer (1), because if you’ve made any important changes, it’s easy enough to make a copy of the layout and reference that. Plus it’s cleaner, and easier to code. Am I wrong?
So I myself am in number 2 camp. If I am going to copy a product, I would want it to have the exact same properties and seating arrangement ammendments of the product that I was copying.
I think it’s a tough one because obviously some aspects of the product (i.e. that the seats have been sold) get reset, and that allocations can be used in different ways.
Some allocations are structural (like putting seats into an allocation because the balcony is closed or the sound desk is covering the seats) and some are temporary (like, cancelled tickets that are returned to the box office are put into the “returns” allocation instead of just going back on sale).
So “not on sale allocation” perhaps should be copied and “returns allocation” should never be copied and there isn’t a good systematic way of knowing which is which. At least if we reapply the layout fresh it’s clear what will happen.
Oh, I know.
I used to have - and I think I hid because it didn’t serve a purpose any more - a button that would create a new layout based on a performance seating plan. I’ll just reinstate that. That way, if you want the plan reset to the layout, you just copy it, if you want the plan changes preserved, you click a button to create a new layout based on the plan, and then copy it.
