== Quote from Captain Paralytic (paul_lautman@yahoo.com)'s article
> Hi y'all,
> I'm looking for ideas on how to implement a particular type of web
> application, which affects situations such as theatre ticket booking.
> In this particular application there are a number of houses for rent,
> each of which has varying numbers of beds/bedrooms and costs a
> different amount to rent (they are for exhibitors at an exhibition).
> Now, at on stage near the beginning of the process, the user is going
> to say, I'd like house "A1" say. So at that point, I need to "reserve"
> this house for this prospective renter. The user then has to register
> all the members of staff that they intend to have staying at the
> house, along with their requirements. Finally, they pay and all is
> signed and sealed.
> However, at any time during the process, they may decide not to
> complete. So I'm left with a house reserved for a user that has gone
> away, never to return.
> One option I am considering is to reserve the house for a period of
> time (say 30 minutes) and if they haven't completed the transaction in
> that time to put the house back in the pool. I've seen this sort of
> behaviour on a theatre ticket booking site where, if you run through
> the booking process to get details on what is available, you have to
> effectively reserve some seats. When you then go back to try to book
> them once you have decided what you want, they are no longer
> available, but re-appear later. My implementation would at least
> ensure that the house reserved house is available to the person who
> booked it.
> However, we then have the problem of the 30 minutes expiring whilst
> they were entering their card details and being snapped up by someone
> else in the meanwhile, so that having gone through the whole process
> they fail at the last hurdle. I could of course extend the reservation
> period each time they submitted a portion of the form. (I would
> obviously be using failsafe table update mechanisms - transactions/
> table locking/where clause checks).
> So, I was wondering whether anyone had any good advice on how to
> implement this type of process?
> TIA
> Regards
> Paul

you're on the right track to provide a 30 min window of opportunity for the
customer to complete the deal. you may want to write the session info into a table
and update the time (remaining) every time they complete a section of the process.
i think that's what tickermaster does as well.