Restaurant Reservation System

This is a simple restaurant reservation system built in Flask & Python

Installation Requirements

This application requires Flask, the Flask SQL Alchemy extension (which installs SQL Alchemy), and the WTForms package

Flask:

pip install Flask

Flask SQL Alchemy

pip install Flask-SQLAlchemy

WTForms

pip install WTForms

Running the application

Simply run "run.py", this will start the local web server.

Admin section

To access the admin portion of the application, go to /admin.

Notes

Metrics:

• Table utilization on the given day
• Reservation slot utilization (number of reservations on a given day vs number of possible reservations)

Additional metrics to gather:

• Since we are tracking guests who book a reservation, we can build a statistical profile of that guest (e.g. how often they dine, how big their parties are, etc)
• Study which tables are booked more frequently and at which times

Additional Features to add:

• More form validation
• A better date/time picker for forms
• More dynamic tables, sorting, etc on the Admin side for studying reservations and table utilization
• The ability to delete reservations and tables
• A multi-restaurant interface (so you'd need a restaurant table to track that)
• Obviously a better visual design
• Not yet displaying form validation error messages

Trade-Offs

• I am using a set difference to determine which tables of a given capacity are free, but this disrupts my way of trying to efficiently seat each guest. In other words, for a given reservation, I want to associate that reservation with the table with the closest capacity to the number of guests in that party.
• I am using DateTimes to store the reservation times, so this requires some additional work for dealing with strictly date ranges (as opposed to storing a date and a time separately)
• I'm only tracking Guests by name right now, so I need to build something a bit more complex - probably a login/profile type set up.
• Using Flask / SQL Alchemy vs Django - More work required to put the application together, however you have more flexibility with how you want to structure things. Using SQL Alchemy, you have a lot of freedom with how you want to map Python objects to database tables.

Table design

Guest

• ID - Primary Key
• name - String
• phone_number - String

Table

• ID - Primary Key
• Capacity - Integer

Reservation

• ID - Primary Key
• guest_id - Foreign Key(Guest)
• table_id - Foreign Key(Table)
• num_guests - Integer
• reservation_time - DateTime

Misc

Assumed reservation length - 1 hour (see app/models.py) Restaurant opening time - 4pm Restaurant closing time - 10pm (see app/views.py)