When a web user requests a booking, do you wish MyCourts to check whether their personal password is correct? When enabled, if the personal passwords don't match then the booking will not be recorded.
When a user requests a booking, MyCourts Offline Web Page located on your remote web server will generate an email message and send it to MyCourts own email address. MyCourts automatically downloads email from the mail server. Using the spin control, select the period in minutes between each mail check.
Mail checks take approximately 5 seconds to determine if there is any mail and can take a further 1-2 seconds for each email it needs to download. These times are based on an internet connection speed of about 7 megabytes with no other traffic.
If set to 5 minutes, if a booking is made immediately after MyCourts has collected the mail, the member will need to wait approximately 6 minutes before a confirming email is sent to them.
Please be aware however that some mail servers do not immediately send mail that they receive. They can sometimes store this mail for later delivery when the network is not otherwise congested. Additionally, some mail servers require individual mails to be delivered twice, the first being rejected in an effort to reduce spam. MyCourts has no control over these delays.
MyCourts running on your computer updates the web pages at the remote web server via the FTP connection. You can select how often MyCourts will update your remote web site here.
Using the spin control, you can select the time interval between MyCourts creating and uploading the web pages to your web site.
If you leave this at '0', MyCourts will automatically update your website every time there is a booking made for any of your facilities. That includes whenever a booking is received via the web.
If you receive frequent bookings, it may be preferable to set this time other than '0'.
This setting does not affect your Mail check interval. They are two separate processes.
The Offline Web Service is designed to be hosted on a remote web server that is using the Apache web server software. Normally, the emails passing between your web server and MyCourts will be generated on the Apache web server using PHP.
MyCourts can however be configured to use your Apache or IIS hosted web service by uploading pages that can also refer your users to your own MyCourts internal IIS compatible web service. This way your users can view court/facility availability and if a suitable time slot is available they can then logon to your MyCourts IIS hosted service and complete the request for the booking in real time.
To enable this functionality, select from the three options available:
Offline is the default and and means that all processing of reservation requests will be handled via email.
Online will 'hide' the email reservation form and instead provide a link to your MyCourts internal web service.
None will disable all web reservations but will still allow your visitors to view court/facility availability.
MyCourts requires it's own directory on your web server's computer. The directory can be called anything you like.
MyCourts will write files to this directory as follows:
'index.html'
This is the main index or 'home' file and contains some helpful text and a list of all the pages that contain details of each days bookings.
'20080229.html'
Bookings for each day are listed in a html file that is named by the following convention, yyyymmdd.html where yyyy is the year, mm is the month and dd is the day. Hence, the above file will have all the bookings for each facility for the 29th February 2008.
'mailer.php'
This file receives the form data from 20080229.html and sends an email to the MyCourts email address.
WARNING:
This directory is for the exclusive use of MyCourts. Do not use this directory for any other purpose as the files contained therein are frequently deleted.
When setting up your connection, note that you can either connect to your ftp root directory at login OR if you have a separate FTP Login for MyCourts, directly to the MyCourts directory. MyCourts does not detect what ftp server directory it is in so you need to know what directory you are placed in when you make an FTP Connection. Once you have that information, enter the path to MyCourts own directory in this field. If you connect directly to the MyCourts directory, this field will be blank.
You can check what directory you are placed in at logon using any number of free FTP software programs or by asking your Web Hosting provider.