too long

Question

I am developing Bus Reservation System but i am stack on how to implement this situation.

I will use this funny example of countries so you can get an idea.

A Bus main Route is from USA To China but it have some stop points like England, India and Russia.

Main Route USA To CHINA

Sub-Route USA To ENGLAND ENGLAND To INDIA INDIA To RUSSIA RUSSIA To CHINA

The logic i need a help to implement is

1. if a Passenger board from USA and off board in England sat on A1 seat what logic should i use when another passenger want to book the same seat A1 from England to India or Russia???
2. I need advice which logic should i use when a seat B1 lets say was booked from England to China what logic should i use when passengers from India & Russia to China to show them that seat B1 is booked.

I tried to brainstorm this situation whole day without any success. Need help guys.

Answer 1

Instead of thinking of reservations being for a whole trip, instead think of reservations being for each step of the trip.

Lets say your bus route is: USA to Russia to China to England to India. If i book a seat from USA to India then in your system treat it like I booked 4 trips with the same seat.

Someone might book B1 England to India, then if I want B1 for USA to india, I should be able to see that it is only available for USA to England. I would need to book a different seat for England to India or go on a different day if they are all full.

Here is a very, very, very basic DB concept:

• Trips: have many steps

• id, name, date

• steps_trips: lookup table

• id, step_id, trip_id

• Steps: have many trips

• id, startpoint, endpoint, start_time, end_time

• busses_steps: lookup table

• id, buss_id, step_id

• Busses: have many seats, have many steps

• id, name, vin

• Seats: belongs to busses

• id, name, buss_id

So the idea here is that you might have several busses running several different routes. A traveler can pick a trip then your system can choose the busses and seats based on availability and time.

This is a very involved problem so I suggest starting small the building up. You will need a way to handle reserved seating as well as cancelations, and it would be a good idea to present the available seats visually somehow in your system as well.