Visit timetables

For prisons where VSiP is being used for visit management, indicated by their presence on the VSiP orchestration endpoint /config/prison/supported, timeslots are sourced from the VSiP orchestration /visit-sessions endpoint for the specified prison and prisoner. No filtering logic is applied in PVB, all related business logic for capacity, non-association, etc. is outside the concern of PVB and remains in VSiP.

Public booking windows

We can override the "booking window" that we use to control the number of days ahead visits can be selected. The api.rb file contains parameters that control the window length.

These are:

• pvbAdvanceFromDateByDays - this is the number of days we "add" on to the lower window we get via the VSIP API that are set at a prison level. For example, if a prison sets there lower window to 3 days, we add on the value of the pvbAdvanceFromDateByDays - so if it was set to 1 day, the total would be 1 day plus 3 days = 4 days
• toDateOverride - this is upper window limit. Some prisons have long windows to allow for booking into the future - but we dont want visitors to have same window. This is normally set to 28

Feature flag

We can control manually if the VSiP service can be used for slot information using a feature flag.

If the flag is set to 'true' PVB/Public will access VSIP, if set to anything else it will not.

To change the flag delete the kubernetes secret with:

kubectl delete secret -n prison-visits-booking-[dev, staging, production] use-vsip

and set it to true or false:

kubectl create secret generic -n prison-visits-booking-[dev, staging, production] use-vsip --from-literal=USE_VSIP='false'