Subject: Can’t get there from here
The subject is tongue in cheek but it is accurate for the direct booking case. The R&R template was not designed or intended to reserve multiple rooms with a single request. It was designed to reserve a single room or resource at a time.
If you want to book multiple rooms at one time you need to create the reservation on your Calendar. From there you can book any number of rooms (including rooms in different R&R databases). Notes handles generating all of the workflow to R&R so you do not have to.
For a very long time now we have strongly recommended against direct bookings of R&R. There are many benefits to booking from your Calendar instead of directly in R&R database:
1: You do all of your meeting arrangements in 1 place, not 2 (or more). You do no need to juggle different meeting attendee scheduling from your Calendar and then finding and reserving different rooms in potentially different databases. Working in your Calendar alone saves time and energy.
2: Rooms are automatically updated when meetings move or are cancelled. If you manually book rooms then you need to remember to reschedule them as well when a meeting moves or is cancelled. Failing to do so could result in not having a room when you need it or keeping a room from being used by others when you do not actually need it any more.
3: Room information and room changes are automatically relayed to meeting participants. If you booked them separately then you would need to remember to update that info on the calendar version and then update your invitees.
4: Booking from your Calendar allows the system to more easily notify you if you do not get the room you wanted. If a room is booked for some of your repeating meeting dates or the room owner decides in 2 days that you are going to be bumped, the system will send you Decline notice that appears in your Inbox so you are made aware of the potential problem with your meeting. When direct booking the system does not send you any such emails so the onus is on your to go and recheck.
Sure there are those times when you may need to direct book (e.g. my substitute AA does not have access to my Calendar and I need a meeting set up ASAP). However those are exceptions rather than the rule.
If you really, really, really want to go and modify the R&R database to allow multiple room bookings from a single form then knock yourself out.
Make sure your template changes generate separate requests to each room (and only those rooms in that R&R dB!). You cannot simply make some items multivalued and have it work. That wont work for cases where all the names are not available (or some have owner requirements and others do not). You MUST make separate requests for each room you want so they can be processed separately by room owners & the Rooms and Resource Manager task.
Bruce
IBM