Hello -
We are setting up SYOS on our website, and are trying to determine the best way to indicate a show is SYOS enabled in Tessitura.
On the "Performance Details" screen, we are debating using a value on the "Keywords" tab or adding a content type & value on the "Content" tab.
Would appreciate any pro's or cons for either approach or if there is still another better option.
Thanks.
-Kevin
Hi Kevin,
We use keywords here at Cal Performances. In fact, since SYOS is the rule for us, we have a "No SYOS" keyword for performances/venues that don't support it.
The pros with keywords generally are that they can be applied and removed quickly in Season Manager > Season Maintenance, and you can also search on performances using a keyword.
The cons are pretty large on the web:
1) Keywords are cached in the API, and it can take a long time for a keyword change to be picked up online.
2) Built-in API methods are designed to search by keyword, but do not return or provide an option to query keywords by performance.
As a result, prior web code for choosing whether to display the SYOS or Best Seat interfaces basically did a search for all performances with the right keyword, then looked through the list to see if any of the performance ids matched the current performance id. Actually, we did that for a whole slew of keywords: gruesomly inefficient.
I built a view for pulling keywords (it's a little tricky in that keywords are supposed to be inherited from higher level performance elements) by performance id, made it a "Local Table", and then built a ASP.Net object to handle them. This has the advantage of allowing me to pull all relevant keywords for any performance in one go, and it isn't filtered through the caching mechanism, so results are always up-to-date.
For a number of the things we used to use keywords for (for instance, whether there is a potential parking issue because of nearby sporting events, or if there will be a pre-performance lecture) I have changed the performance page to pull that data out of new Web Content types, but the downside of Web Content is that you _cannot_ apply it using Season Manager, so simple yes/no questions that will affect a large number of performances are a pain to apply that way. As a result, things like "No SYOS" continue to use keywords.
--Gawain
Greetings,
We created a Content element for the Productions tab that uses y/n. The Pros/Cons could be about the same as a keyword depending on your website setup and how you set up events (i.e we build our performances starting at the Title screen whereas some other put their Season there).
Gawain & Michael - Thanks for the replies, much appreciated!