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A machine leaves your yard for a fortnight. While it is away, the person scanning it is not your fitter — it is somebody at another company, running different software, who has no login to anything of yours. The tag on the machine cannot change. What it does can.

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How it works

Add one Yes/No field to the Item, then let two groups of buttons watch it. Then, in the Page Editor, put your internal buttons inside one Container and the hire buttons inside another, and give each container a condition in the Visibility group:
A Container hides its children with it, so that is two conditions for the whole page rather than one per button. Now the tag reads differently depending on one tick box:
Tick the box when the machine goes out. Untick it when it comes back. Nothing physical is touched and nothing is produced again.

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What goes where

The hire buttons are the point: a form on Jotform or Google Forms can be filled in by anyone, so the hirer’s crew can complete a pre-start check without you setting up a single account for them.

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Set a default, or existing Items will surprise you

Add a Yes/No field to a Collection that already has Items and those Items have no value for it — not false, nothing. A condition testing == false would then hide your internal buttons on every machine you already own. Two things avoid it:
  • Give the field a Field Default so no Item is ever unset.
  • Write the internal condition as item.on_hire != true rather than == false, so anything that is not explicitly ticked counts as in the yard.
Check it before you rely on it. The Visibility field shows a Visible or Hidden badge against whichever Item you have selected, so switch to a real machine rather than trusting the base template — see Conditional Visibility.

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What it needs

  • One Yes/No field on the Collection, with a default
  • Two Containers on the Page, one condition each
  • A form the hirer can open without an account
  • Somebody to tick the box. This is the real cost: it is a step in your hire-out process, and a machine that goes out with the box unticked shows the hirer buttons they cannot use

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Why not just give them a login

You can, and for a long-term hire you probably should. This is for the fortnight — where setting up an account, having it approved, and remembering to remove it costs more than the hire earns, and where the machine is going to three different companies this quarter.