Understanding the Seating Plan Graphic
This section describes how to use the seating plan graphic and the different parts of the main screen.
The default display includes a venue seating plan, the Performance Graphic. If the performance graphic is not displayed, select Booking > Performance Graphic.
The seats can be displayed according to their Status (Available/Booked/Sold/Held), their Type (as set up in Production Types), or their Hold Code (as set up in Hold Codes). Which of these options appears by default in the performance graphic is determined by a system property. To change this option, in Administration go to Setup > Organisation > Settings > Properties and select your preferred option for the BoxOfficeInitialView property.
Status
When Status is selected from the dropdown list above the performance graphic, a statistics panel indicates the colour coding for each status, along with the number of seats in each status.
Type
Alternatively, the graphic can show the seats according to their seat Type (e.g. Reserve/Premium/Standard). The seat types for the venue are configured in the Administration module (see Seat Types). The statistics panel still shows the number of seats by status, but it now also includes a legend to match colours to seat types. In this view, seats that are not available will appear as a paler shade of the legend colours.
Hold Code
When Hold Code is selected from the dropdown list, the graphic will show the seats according to the hold codes assigned to each seat. The hold codes are configured in the Administration module (see Hold Codes). The statistics panel still shows the number of seats by status, but it now also includes a legend to match colours to hold codes. In this view, seats that are not available will appear in white. Seats that are available to be booked or held will appear in a pale shade of the colour for the default hold code.
Viewing Seat Information
Hover the mouse pointer over seats, and a tooltip will appear displaying the seat identity and type.
If the system property AdornAreaSeats is set to show row and column identifiers, these may appear around the seat area to make it easy to find a specific seat.
Selecting Seats
Seats can be selected and booked in any of these views.
To select all seats of a status, right-click on the status indicator to select all seats of that type of all seats of that type in a particular section.
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Specific seats can be selected by:
- Clicking on each individual seat
- Clicking and holding down the left mouse button, and sweeping or 'lassoing' over the seats required.
When you release the mouse button, the seats will be selected:
Click a selected seat again to unselect it.
You can also unselect all seats by clicking on the Unselect button:
In an Unreserved or General Admission (GA) production, if you click on the Book button without having first selected seats, you will be prompted for how many seats to book:
In a Reserved or Allocated Seats production, if you click on Book without first selecting seats, it will assume best available. You will be prompted for how many seats to book. If there is more than one seat type in the seating plan, you will be asked what seat type is required before the best available seats in that type are selected:
Understanding Available Seat Information
The Performance Graphic legend indicates how many seats are available for sale. However, as seats selected by another operator or by a person using the web interface to purchase a ticket online are still technically available as the tickets have not yet been sold, they cannot be re-selected by another person, otherwise double-bookings could occur. Such selected seats are not in the Held or Reserved state, they are Available but cannot be selected. To inform the operator how many Available seats are already currently selected, the legend shows a negative number after the total number of seats Avail. This number represents the number of selected seats. In the Performance Graphic’s seating layout, seats selected by other operators or users are indicated by an @ symbol replacing the letter on the seat.
Below, six seats have been selected by another operator and are marked @. An additional four seats have been selected by this operator. Next to Avail in the legend, it says that 456 seats are available, (-10) currently selected. These ten selected seats are the sum of the six selected by other operators, and the four selected here.
Variations in Size and Appearance of the Performance Graphic
The graphic will auto-size to fit the whole venue on screen, and smaller venues will have larger seats in the graphic. Compare the next two screens, which show the Lisle Grand theatre’s stalls and dress circle sections organised into separate tabs. The stalls have a lot of seats and so seats are scaled to a small size.
The seating plan graphic is scaled up when there are fewer seats to display, such as for this dress circle.
You can boost or shrink the seat size by adjusting the controls at the top right corner of the performance graphic seating plan.
If the production is set as Unreserved Seating (General Admittance), no seating graphic is displayed, but the statistics panel will be centred on screen:
