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-Native Resource Planning
A formula-only approach to building a smart booking system
One of the most powerful things about is its ability to be shaped into a truly custom app, even for complex tasks like resource planning. All it takes is a bit of work to build a solution that has almost no limits. It all starts with one core idea: the user — an employee reserving a meeting room or a customer renting a bike — should only see what’s actually available.
The journey to building a truly universal booking system in Coda is fascinating because it’s fundamentally a process of confronting and formalizing assumptions. The blinking cursor on a blank Coda doc may suggest infinite possibilities, but in practice, the most elegant and scalable solutions are forged by the constraints you choose to work with.
Why Native Coda Forms Matter
The core of any good reservation system is a form that can intelligently access your booking data and only present open slots. This immediately rules out using third-party tools like Fillout or Jotform, as they can’t talk directly to your Coda tables in the way we need. The booking logic itself can also vary in complexity, as you’ve discovered. Reserving a hotel room for a night has different rules than booking a meeting room for a few hours. The latter, with its…
