Hostel booking

Students browse hostels, apply for a bed, pay a deposit; wardens approve allocations and log maintenance.

New here: a four-level hierarchy — hostel, room, bed, booking — and the decision that makes the whole system work or not.

Resource	What it holds
Semester	The period a booking is for
Student	Including gender, which allocation depends on
Hostel	On-campus or private, with a gender policy
HostelPhoto	The gallery
Room	Number, floor, price, capacity
Bed	One sleeping place, with a status
Booking	A student in a bed for a semester
Deposit	What they paid to hold it
MaintenanceRequest	Something broken in a room

Allocate beds, not rooms

The decision that matters. A triple room has three students in it, who arrive separately, leave separately, and are not a group. Book the room and you need a occupants count, a rule that stops it exceeding capacity, and no way to say which bed is free — and “two of three beds taken” is the single most common question the system is asked.

Book the bed and all of that disappears. Availability is status = free. Capacity is enforced by there being three Bed rows. Nobody double-books because a bed is one row with one booking.

The cost is one more table. It is the cheapest table you will ever add.

1. The app

Next.js

pnpm create flare-framework hostel
cd hostel
docker compose up -d

Cloudflare

pnpm create flare-framework hostel --stack cloudflare
cd hostel

2. Setup and people

npx flare gen resource Semester --icon calendar-range --group Setup \
  --fields 'name:string!, startsOn:date, endsOn:date, current:boolean'

npx flare gen resource Student --icon user --group People \
  --fields 'regNumber:string!, fullName:string, gender:enum(female,male,other), userId:string?'

gender is on the student because allocation depends on it, and a hostel has a policy about it. That is the only reason it is here — a field nobody uses is a field nobody should be asked for.

3. The hierarchy

npx flare gen resource Hostel --icon building-2 --group Housing \
  --fields 'name:string!, kind:enum(onCampus,private), genderPolicy:enum(female,male,mixed), address:string?, latitude:float?, longitude:float?, approved:boolean, ownerId:string?'

npx flare gen resource HostelPhoto --icon image --group Housing \
  --fields 'image:file:[image]:5mb, hostel:belongsTo(Hostel)'

npx flare gen resource Room --icon door-open --group Housing \
  --fields 'number:string, floor:int, kind:enum(single,double,triple,dormitory), pricePerSemester:money, capacity:int, hostel:belongsTo(Hostel)'

npx flare gen resource Bed --icon bed --group Housing \
  --fields 'label:string, status:enum(free,booked,occupied,outOfService), room:belongsTo(Room)'

approved:boolean on the hostel is the landlord workflow in one field: a private hostel is listed but invisible until an admin ticks it.

outOfService as a bed status is worth having from the start. A broken bed is not free and is not occupied, and without a third state somebody will book it.

pricePerSemester:money is on the room rather than the bed, because that is how it is advertised — and if you ever price beds differently within a room, moving it is one field.

4. Booking

npx flare gen resource Booking --icon key --group Housing \
  --fields 'status:enum(applied,approved,rejected,cancelled,checkedIn), rejectedBecause:text if status == rejected, bookedAt:datetime, student:belongsTo(Student), bed:belongsTo(Bed), semester:belongsTo(Semester)'

npx flare gen resource Deposit --icon banknote --group Housing \
  --fields 'amount:money, method:enum(cash,bank,mobileMoney,card), transactionRef:string!, status:enum(pending,paid,refunded), paidAt:datetime?, booking:belongsTo(Booking)'

A booking is a student, a bed and a semester. The semester is what makes it history rather than state: last year’s bookings stay, and the same bed is free again in September without deleting anything.

transactionRef:string! unique — the same idempotency trick as the fees project. A mobile-money provider that retries its callback cannot credit twice.

5. Maintenance

npx flare gen resource MaintenanceRequest --icon wrench --group Housing \
  --fields 'description:text, status:enum(open,inProgress,done,rejected), reportedById:string, resolvedAt:datetime?, room:belongsTo(Room)'

Against the room, not the bed: a leaking roof is not one student’s problem.

6. Run it

npx flare migrate
npx flare seed:resource Semester 4
npx flare seed:resource Student 100
npx flare seed:resource Hostel 10
npx flare seed:resource Room 60
npx flare seed:resource Bed 180
npx flare seed:resource Booking 120
npx flare dev

What you still owe

• The allocation rules. A female student cannot be allocated a bed in a male hostel; a bed must be free; one student gets one bed per semester. None of that is in the schema and all of it is your validation — a hook on Booking create. This is the core of the project.
• Bed status in step with bookings. Approving a booking makes the bed booked; checking in makes it occupied; cancelling frees it. Two places holding related state is the classic bug here, so write it once, in a hook, and never set Bed.status from a screen.
• Double-booking under load. Two students applying for the last bed in the same second both pass a “is it free” check. The fix is a unique constraint on (bedId, semesterId) so the database refuses the second — add it as a migration by hand, which is the right instinct whenever correctness depends on a race.
• Mobile money, a map view from the latitude and longitude, and the real-time availability display.

Make it yours

• Students see their own bookings. The owner is on Student, so this is a hook, like the clinic.
• Landlords manage their own hostels. npx flare gen policy Hostel --roles '*' --own ownerId --own-except warden,admin
• Soft delete bookings, so a cancelled allocation is still visible when somebody asks who had that bed in March.