Hospitality Service
The 7.00 uses a discrete background service“ to support hospitality-related functionality, including:
- Communication with a property management system (PMS)
- Communication with client applications, such as InnDesk and PMS Monitor
- Communication with the PBX to modify extension configuration, such as names, DND status, class of service, etc. (options vary by PBX).
- Performance of the various hospitality functions, such as check in, check out, room move, etc.
- Nightly maintenance actions, such as resetting maid status to 'dirty' (or equivalent) for all checked-in room mailboxes.
For the most part, this service should be transparent to the user; it is automatically started at boot-time by the main 7.00 service, which also monitors it to make sure it continues to run properly.
Configuration
The hospitality service is configured using System Configuration by selecting Features | Hospitality from the menu. Features and options you can configure include:
Logging
The hospitality service logs all its activity (except the raw PMS communication) in a log file named HOSTELn, where n is the server instance number.
For example, most systems only have one server instance, so the associated service log would be identified as HOSTEL1. Log files use the file extension .LTT and are stored in the path C:\VS\TRACELOGS.
Each night around midnight, the log files “roll over,” meaning the current log HOSTEL1.LTT is renamed as HOSTEL1-YYYYMMDD0000.LTT, or something similar, where YYYYMMDD is the year, month and day of the content of the file (that is, the date that most or all of the log entries were logged). Older files are moved to the ARCHIVE sub-folder.
Log files may be viewed using the Trace Display application, shown below. Refer to the Trace Display page for more details on using this utility.
The log file contains the following fields, shown as columns in the dialog above:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Log | The base name that identifies which log the entry was logged to. For the hospitality service log, this will always be HOSTEL followed by the server instance number. In most cases, it would be HOSTEL1. |
| Date-Time | The date and time when the log entry was logged. Format is: YYYY/MM/DD-HH:MM:SS.msec.All values are padded with leading zeros; the millisecond value is padded to three digits and all others to two digits. The hour value is always in 24-hour clock notation. |
| Filter | Filter level. Can be ignored. |
| Data | The actual log statement generated by the service. Log statements can be a little cryptic and are generally intended as a debugging aid for the manufacturer's technicians and developers. Still, they can sometimes be useful even to on-site technicians to verify or troubleshoot certain issues. In the case of the HOSTEL log, you can see if the PMS link has been established (if relevant) and see various actions being performed, such as check in, check out, and so forth. |