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How can I retrieve the selected seats?
How can I retrieve the selected seats?

4 ways to get the selected seat IDs on your server-side code, so you can book them via the Seats API

Ben Verbeken avatar
Written by Ben Verbeken
Updated over a week ago

Your ticket buyer has selected seats on the interactive floor plan. Now you need to pass those seats to your server-side code, so you can later on book them via the Seats API. 

There are 4 ways to do this.  

  1. via selectedObjectsInputName.
    If you add selectedObjectsInputName:"aFormFieldNameYouChooseYourself"  to the seating chart configuration, the Seats Renderer will add a hidden input field with that name to your form. Note that the div in which you render the chart needs to be embedded in a <form>  tag for this to work. 

  2. via chart.selectedObjects.
    new seatsio.SeatingChart({}).render(); returns a seatsio.SeatingChart object, that has a selectedObjects property. This is a JavaScript array of strings that contains the selected object labels. Of course, we update the value on each select and deselect. 

  3. via chart.listSelectedObjects().
    new seatsio.SeatingChart({}).render();  returns a seatsio.SeatingChart object on which you can call listSelectedObjects(callback) . The callback you pass in will be called on the list of selected objects. 

  4. by listening to onObjectSelected and onObjectDeselected events, and keeping track of the selected objects yourself. 

Multi-level pricing

If you're using multi-level pricing, this means you have multiple ticket types (and associated price points) for a single category. For example, in Category A, a child seat is 5$ and an an adult seat is 10$. 

This means you'll probably want to retrieve not just the selected seat ID (e.g. SectionX-A-1), but also the selected ticket type (e.g. "adult"). 

In that case, you can't use selectedObjectsInputName nor chart.selectedObjects, as they contain just the seat IDs. 

Instead, you should use chart.listSelectedObjects(callback) . The callback takes the list of selected objects as a parameter, and the objects in the list have a selectedTicketType  property, indicating the ticket type: 

<div id="chart"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.seatsio.net/chart.js"></script>
<script>
    var chart = new seatsio.SeatingChart({
        divId: "chart",
        publicKey: "publicDemoKey",
        event: "smallTheatreEvent2",
        pricing: [
            {'category': 1, 'ticketTypes': [
                {'ticketType': 'adult', 'price': 30},
                {'ticketType': 'child', 'price': 20}
            ]},
            {'category': 2, 'ticketTypes': [
                {'ticketType': 'adult', 'price': 40},
                {'ticketType': 'child', 'price': 30},
                {'ticketType': '65+', 'price': 25}
            ]},
            {'category': 3, 'price': 50}
        ],
        priceFormatter: function(price) {
            return '$' + price;
        }
    }).render();
   
    function printSelectedObjects() {
        chart.listSelectedObjects(
            selectedObjects => console.table(selectedObjects)
        );
    }
</script>

<button onClick="printSelectedObjects();">
  Print Selected Seats to console
</button>

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