Resource Calendar Infestations

Resource Calendars are, in theory, a default supported out of the box solution. They are in practice probably the buggiest part of Sharepoint. They simply don't work out of the box. At all. Possibly the engineers were told to make them happen two weeks out from ship and then decided to deprecate support - no-one really knows.

Have you turned on Site Features: Anything With This Icon?

The icon for "make my site functional already."

 
No?
Go turn that on, I'll wait.

You now have access to two main sorts of Calendar. The basic one, which works pretty well but needs colouring to be made actually useful, and the Resource Calendar. Resource Calendars can be useful, but they have bugs worse than your old apartment tower. Let's go through creating a functional one.

Most of this content is available with sufficient googling.
Steps are now numbered, due to my own morbid curiosity.

1. Create a Resource Calendar.
1. Go to Site Actions: More Options and select Calendar.
2. Click More Options.
3. Tickybox that this calendar will be used for Resource Reservation.
   Reflect that nothing good ever comes from MS's randomized proper nouns.
2. Try to add a thing to it.
1. There are no resources in your Resource List.
2. Site Actions: View All Site Content: Lists: Resource List
3. Populate that sumbitch with individual resources
4. Click the "Items" tab
5. Just for giggles, click New Item until you get New Resource Group
6. Populate that with your created resources, IE: conference rooms.
3. Already frustrated and perhaps tiddly, return to your calendar and add some resources. Maybe a group, so you can compare double bookings. 
1. Click "Add Resources"
2. Select from the menu that appears
3. Click Add
4. Click "okay"
4. Book one of them.
1. Double click "Tuesday"
2. A popup will appear
3. Note that, having added a resource group to the calendar, all of the available resources are already selected for your event. 
4. Reflect on the peculiarity of their pre-selection as you de-select a few and book your event.
5. Hooray! You appear to have had a success in booking a resource!
6. Navigate away from the calendar.
7. Navigate to your calendar
8. Where is your resource. It is not there. Where did it go. WHY did it go. WHY. Why-ee.
1. If you have a thing for breaking in case of stress, break it.
9. Re-add resources to your calendar. At least your booking is, in fact, still there.
10. Try to repair this with jQuery, using Thomas Zedepa MacMillan's technique and Fiddler.
1. Learn to use Fiddler.
2. Rejoice in learning Fiddler.
3. This method takes hours, but does eventually work.
4. Don't forget to specify the individual resource list that should be pulled in.
11. Oh hey, it loads! Now your calendar loads its resources list by default.
1. A resource list. The one you listed after following those painstaking steps.
2. Because Sharepoint's permissioning is weird, that resource list will always load if you save that code as a web-part.
3. So you have to re-do the code and the hack for every resource list you want to load by default in your entire site.
12. Look at the toolbar and notice that it offers day and week but no month views for resources.
13. Load the month view of the calendar.
14. Notice it loads but a single resource at a time in Month View.
15. Notice that it does this no matter how you hack it.
16. Accio paper sack.
17. Take a deep, deep breath. 
18. Scream into your pet sack until the weird robot sounds happen and you get the chequered vision problem.
1. Optional: Begin loading your resume to Dice.com, never mentioning you have even heard of Sharepoint.
2. Post in several locations that you are a patient human with soft human skin who would like a rewarding career, rather than this one.
19. This is the actual answer, via - improbably! - MSDN themselves.
1. Create a new Group Calendar. In the More Options select "Use this calendar for resource reservations"
2. Once the calendar is created, go into the Calendar list settings. Click Title Description and Navigation. Set "Use this calendar for resource reservation" to no.
3. While in the calendar list settings, Click Change new button order and default content type. Check "Reservations" and set it to the default content type.
   
   When you go back to the calendar it will just have the normal calendar ribbon without the buggy resource selection options. When you add a new list item, the calendar will be associated to the resource list and let you select the resources and detect their availability.

Ta-dah! You really only have to do three incredibly counter-intuitive steps to get a functional calendar, after all.

Last step: Please replace your pet screaming bag. It is no use to you all blown out like that. How will you get through the holidays with a destroyed stress containment unit. Silly.