Hi all,
Has anyone come up with a good custom view to display seat location information specifically for use in WordFly? I've got one built out that works perfectly for front and back end use in Tessitura, but we are struggling to come up with a solution that addresses those edge cases that cause a patron to have multiple rows of data when it comes to seat location info. For example, patrons who have tickets to multiple performances in the same production/run, patrons who have blocks of seats in 2+ areas/levels of the house, patrons with non-contiguous seats, etc. - we aren't sure how to best get this information to display in a single line of data in a way that is clear and clean. We specifically want to pull this information into our pre-show emails, which we run on a per production basis (rather than per performance). We've spoken to WordFly's support team about this, but they have been pretty insistent that this must be addressed on the Tessitura end.
Thanks!
Lauren
Lauren Gruber,
It depends on just how pretty you want it look and how much work you want to do. The ticket history table (and requisite view) DOES give you all the actual information you need, but, as you have noted, there may be multiple rows returned per production (as there in fact can be even multiple rows per performance). On the sheer basis of getting just "one column per production", that is not too unreasonably difficult. Basically you would just do a VIEW of the original ticket history view that concatenates by production (or production season; it is hard to know how each organization uses those two terms in local parlance as they are often used interchangeably) per customer. The issue with that is that it might look less clean because you have to fit in things like multiple performance dates, and/or repeat something like "Row: F" multiple times over rather than just once and listing out all the seats in Row F if they happened to be split between different rows because they were done in separate orders or with different price types. So definitely possible, but might not be the CLEANEST that you want sent out in a Wordfly e-mail.
Alternatively, we have needed to output a patron's full set of seat locations on a number of reports, so I created a few local functions that do just that. For a given order/customer/performance/etc... those seats can be output and set out in a nice neat row. But the problem there being that it is a function that uses a cursor and creates things on the fly. Running that into a view would eat up a decent chunk of time if trying to include it into an Output set for Wordfly or else require you to regularly run it and create/update the information onto a local table for all tickets, patrons and performances for then a simple output to Wordfly when needed.
This notion has passed through my head a few times, but, for those reasons above, we have not really moved on it. I would be curious if anyone else had any other ideas. If you are interested in talking through the ones I have described above though, let me know.
Best of luck!
John A. Moskal II
Thanks for your thoughts on this, John. I have been going back and forth with similar thoughts of "I could probably get everything into one line but it would be ugly" and wondering if that sort of defeats the purpose then. Glad to know at least we aren't alone in having approached this a few different times and stopped at the same sticking point.
Yep.
Specifically, it takes and order and concatenates, performance name, date, seat row/number etc, with some html in a "stuff for XML path" and then loops for as many line items (or is it SLI ... I can check) with a carriage return for each new line. This whole thing gets wrapped up in one single output set element of course so you can pull it through to your email in a single line of output set data - dispensing with the multiple rows.
You can do a confirmation or preshow from it. I created it in COVID as we had a GA performance that we were required to seat in fixed numbered seats after the original booking.
It's pretty basic and it's a trick that many peeps use for a variety of things. My Analytics Manager is a bit of a genius and did similar (for Gift Certificates) into a table.
Is that what you are after? Essentially you can take the ticket history info grouped around Order ID (or perf ID) and stuff them together with a new line after every new line.
Cheers,H
I've been running this around in my head, specifically looking at the somewhat gruesome Ticket History generating procedure, which uses three loops just to output one row per row of seats. My first concern, though, is what the character limit for values sent to Wordfly is.
The functions I created for my reports shamelessly rip off those loops plus a few little custom things specific to our venue set-up. And, much as I would like to believe there is a better way around it, I am just not sure there truly is given the vast number of different ways tickets could appear on any given account. You have to basically just gather them all up together first and then just start going through each of them.