Author: HireHop

Equipment Rental Software for Xero – HireHop + Xero: Hire Company & Accounting Software

Xero equipment rental software partner integration
HireHop effortlessly synchronizes your invoices, payments, purchase orders, credit notes and contacts with Xero behind the scenes. Utilise the power and extensive functionality of HireHop Equipment Rental Software and Xero Accounting with simplicity and ease, from any device, such as a PC, Mac, tablet or phone, enabling you stay in control of your finances and hires anywhere and at any time.

 




 
Xero Accounting Screen shot
Invoices accounting report






Xero + HireHop App Together Syncplayer_video_id=”FPnTSZc-qVA”;

HireHop & Xero Work Together For You

  • Invoices and purchase orders seamlessly synchronised
  • Multiple Xero companies can be used in HireHop
  • Payments and credits created in HireHop sent to Xero
  • Credit notes and payments created in Xero for HireHop invoices sent to HireHop
  • Let HireHop automatically update Xero or choose to batch update
  • New contacts created in HireHop automatically sent to Xero
  • Seamless automatic integration as Xero & HireHop work as one.
  • Synchronization is live and instant.

Xero certified partner connected hire software

Xero

HireHop and Xero Integration

Invoices
Invoices created in HireHop are automatically sent and updated in Xero behind the scenes with no need for user intervention.
Payments & Credits
Payments and credit notes can be entered into Xero or HireHop, and then each updates the other, as they both automatically communicate with each other.
Purchase Orders
Purchase orders created in HireHop are effortlessly sent to Xero so that you can match purchase invoices to them to help prevent being overcharged.
Contacts
Import only necessary contacts from Xero. HireHop automatically sends new contacts used in invoices and purchase orders to Xero.



About Xero

Xero is world-leading online accounting software, perfectly built for your small business.

  • Get a real-time view of your cash-flow
    Real-time information anytime and anywhere on your Mac, PC, tablet or phone. It’s small business accounting software that’s simple, smart and occasionally magical.
  • Run your business on the go
    Use the Xero mobile app to reconcile, send invoices, or create expense claims from anywhere.
  • Get paid faster
    Faster payments with online invoicing. Send online invoices to your customers and get notified when they’re opened.
  • Reconcile in seconds
    Xero imports and categorises your bank transactions. Just click OK to reconcile.



Easily Connect HireHop Rental Software and Xero

  1. Add a new accounts package in HireHop settings, selecting Xero as the package type.
  2. Synchronise to import bank accounts, nominal codes, tax codes and contacts from Xero
  3. Assign the new Xero connection to the appropriate depots and you are ready to go.

Detailed help..

Posted on by HireHop

Event Rental Software – Software for event, party and AV rental companies

Of all the rental business sectors, event rental is the most challenging, with the most varied demands, workflows and feature requirements. With so many different different lines of stock for rent, with crew allocation, subcontracted rentals, and so many other variants, to efficiently manage this huge complexity you need affordable, easy to use, powerful and feature rich event rental software, built for your industry.

Event Rental Software Specific Requirements

Event hire software makes spectacular events easyAt HireHop we don’t want you to change your workflow, after all, it’s your business and you should run it the way you want to, and not based on the limitations of other software.  This is why there are numerous ways to do the same thing in HireHop, as well as the ability to customise it to make it work the way you want it to, and do what you want it to do, not the other way round.

HireHop was built with the complexities of event rental in mind. Built with functionality to make your workflow more efficient and cost effective without breaking the bank, thus helping your business run more smoothly.  This gives you more time and money to grow your business, instead of wasting time on administration or battling with software to work around your workflows.

Event Hire Software quote documentsCreate Amazing Looking Quotes

A basic or bad looking quote can severely damage your reputation and how clients perceive you. HireHop helps you stand out from the crowd, giving you that extra advantage by letting your customers see that your document presentation is as professional as the service you offer.

HireHop has the most advanced, yet easy to use document engine in the world, enabling you to produce amazing and professional looking quotes at the click of a mouse.

Prevent the disappointment of losing lucrative event rentals due to basic quotes, and let HireHop give you that upper hand over your competitors.

Lighting, Sound, Rigging & AV Rental Software

AV, Lighting, rigging, furniture, catering and sound equipment rental softwareWith some of the largest rigging, AV, lighting and sound rental companies in the world now using HireHop, all switching from their old software, a testimony to how powerful and beneficial HireHop is and how beneficial it can be for you.

HireHop not only manages your stock, it can record Loler and other tests, as well as print out test certificates for all items on a job, with literally the press of a button.  It has multi-depot functionality, with cross-depot hires, and even crew planning modules all included.

Furniture and set hire softwareEvent & Furniture Rental Software

Furniture and other event rental companies have their own unique demands, from using product codes, to chair frames with different seat cushion options, something HireHop not only has, but also makes it easy for the user to manage.  With some of the largest furniture rental companies now adopting HireHop, you can be assured that by switching to it, you have made the right decision.

Manage Event Productions With Your Rental Software

Every event is different, some events, such as your own productions, will be based on a single day rental charge at a higher base price, others, such as rental to a theatre are based on a theatre week, or a standard rental maybe on a three day week, etc.  HireHop is the only equipment rental software than can handle all of these different pricing demands with ease, as well as numerous ways to discount lines or entire jobs in order to accomplish your client’s budget, as well as enabling you to manage your profit margin.
This and other unique features makes HireHop perfect to manage your events, purchase orders and the hires you offer for them.

Hire software barcodeBarcodes For Your Event Rental Software

Some companies barcode their products, others don’t.  HireHop can work with or without barcodes, or even a mixture of both scenarios.  HireHop can even generate barcodes for you, or you can use preexisting barcodes.  HireHop also works with almost every barcode scanner, albeit on normal barcodes or QR codes, it even works with RFID labels.

Free Event Rental Software

As our ethos is to deliver a product that helps event rental companies like yours, we even offer a free version of HireHop software for small single user companies to help them get off the ground.

Try HireHop today for free or contact us to arrange a free demo.

Posted on by HireHop

New Updates & Features – September 2019

We strive to improve our cloud based hire business software by actively listening to our users and implementing the features that they need. We have worked tirelessly to bring you new features and functionality based on users feedback and needs, that many of our users have been beta testing over the past few months. We look forward to continuing our journey together to make the best software even better!

History Logging

New and improved GDPR compliant history logging throughout the system enabling users to view all changes.

Access the History Log from the Menu from Jobs and Projects as well as Hire, Sales, Labour Management and Packages.

No Shortfall Custom Items

If you don’t want a custom item to appear as a shortage, this feature is for you!

Simply tick the ‘no shortfall’ checkbox when creating the custom item, as shown in the image below.

Limit Stock To Depots

For companies that use the multi-depot feature, you can now limit stock items to only be seen and used from certain depots by entering the depot limitations on them within stock management.

This can be applied to Hire, Sales and Labour items, Virtual Items and Packages.

New and Improved HireHop Marketplace

The HireHop online marketplace has been revamped and updated, improving the experience for visitors to the website looking to hire your stock! Click here to search the marketplace and view your listings.

The marketplace is easily searchable through HireHop by users looking to sub-hire equipment, or potential customers searching Google for items that you hire.

To list any hire item on the marketplace, simply navigate Home-Management-Hire Stock Management, edit or create a new item and ensure that a Description (used for marketing) has been entered, alongside a Marketing category. By entering information in these two fields, your item will be added to the marketplace. Note that a price is not required; however is preferred by Google and including a price will likely give your listing a higher Google ranking.

New Reports

More reports have been added and existing ones have been updated to allow for further analysis of your data at the click of a button!

The reports have also been re-designed for better visibility and user experience.

SCA Compliant

We have been working tirelessly over the past months to get HireHop ready for the upcoming EU legislation SCA.

This will not effect your usage of  HireHop and is something that most users will never encounter.

API Extension and More Custom Fields Available

More User Permissions and Search Filters

Speed and Security Improvements 

Bug Fixes and Other Minor Improvements

 

Posted on by HireHop

New Updates & Features – June 2019

We strive to improve our cloud based hire business software by actively listening to our users and implementing the features that they need. We have worked tirelessly to bring you new features and functionality based on users feedback and needs, that many of our users have been beta testing over the past few months. We look forward to continuing our journey together to make the best software even better!

Plugins

Add even more features to your HireHop account through plugins! Multi-Currency is now available as a paid plugin with many more free and paid add-ons to come.

Administrators of monthly subscribed accounts can add and remove plugins by navigating Home-Settings-Subscription-Edit. Once your plugins have been selected, you will be informed how much your updated subscription will be and you will be charged any extra amount once confirmed.

For annual subscribers who are interested in any of our plugins, please contact us.

Multi-Currency

If you work in different currencies, this is for you!

Multi-Currency is available as a plugin at a small monthly cost, which can be set up by following the above instructions. Once enabled, you will have access to unlimited currencies, which can be set throughout the company, depot, job, invoices and purchase orders.

For example, you can quote a job in one currency, send invoices in different currencies and create purchase orders in multiple currencies too. When setting the currency, click on link displayed to take you to the relevant xe.com conversion page for the latest currency conversion rates, and simply enter the rate that you wish to use.

New Resource Planner 

In addition to the existing Resource Planner, the new planner is a more detailed way of viewing and allocating resources to your jobs.

Navigate Home-Management-Resource Management to set up your resources and their skills (labour items) and click on the Resource Planner to view your resources and your labour shortfalls on jobs. Easily switch between Standard and Advanced views from the top right of the screen to make use of both powerful tools!

The advanced resource planner lists out your jobs containing labour items and the specific labour items required on the top of the screen. Click on a particular slot to see which resources are available/unavailable on the bottom half of the screen and assign the chosen resource to the job.

You can also print and email documents directly from the resource planner too!

Tip: if you use the Resource Planner regularly, add the Planner as a Home Page tile from your Settings.

Prioritised Items

By enabling this new feature from Company Settings, jobs that are booked (or set to Provisional) first takes priority over jobs booked later.

Example: I own 1 of Item X. I have 2 enquiries for this item with overlapping dates. The first job that is set to Provisional/Booked will not show a shortfall.

An extra column of ‘Remainder’ is added to the job, which indicates how many of the item are left after the job’s usage. In the above case, Job 1 will show Available -1; Remainder 0, all in black as the item is prioritised for this job and there is no shortfall. Job 2 will show Available -1; Remainder -1 in red as the shortfall is on this job.

However, Job 1 may only be for 1 day, whereas Job 2 is a much more profitable 2 weeks, so users with permission can re-order priorities to alter item availability. To do this, click on the Available number of the specific item within the Supplying list and choose Items priority on the top right of the screen. Drag and drop the to rearrange the priority. This can also be done through the Availability Grid on the Home page.

From the same screen, users also have the ability to set Jobs priority, whereby a job can be moved to the top or bottom of the priority list to affect the priority and availability of all items within that job.

Virtual Depots

Create a virtual depot by navigating Home-Management-Depot Management-New with the parent/sibling Depot selected.

Virtual Depots share assets with their sibling & parent depots, which may be used for the separation of departments or in cases where multiple companies use the same stock. Virtual Depots can have a different logo, address, VAT number, separate invoice sequences and much more, with even more features to come.

Email Sending

Retry or edit if an email fails to send from your server.

To set up your email accounts and ensure your settings are correct, users can navigate Home-Settings-Your Settings.

PDF Rendering Options

More power with 2 PDF rendering engines; Webkit and Chromium.

Barcode Search

Now also from the Menu within Hire Stock Management as well as searching for a Barcode from Home-Search by Number.

Telematics

Add your telematics links to your assets for asset tracking.

Better Gmail Integration

More User Permissions, Search Filters & Settings

Navigating Home-Settings-Your Settings, a new user option is ‘Date autocorrect’. Leave it at ‘Yes’ to remain how it is, or change the Setting to ‘No’ to stop HireHop auto-correcting job date errors when creating or editing a job (e.g. if the Job Finish date is set before the Job Start Date). If an error is detected, instead of auto-correcting, the user will instead be greeted by an warning.

Speed and Security Improvements 

Bug Fixes and Other Minor Improvements

 

Posted on by HireHop

New Updates & Features – February 2019

We strive to improve our cloud based hire business software by actively listening to our users and implementing the features that they need. We have worked tirelessly to bring you new features and functionality based on users feedback and needs, that many of our users have been beta testing over the past few months. We look forward to continuing our journey together to make the best software even better!

Logging

Set up the logging settings for your hire stock items from the Menu within Hire Stock Management. Once set up, you will be prompted on the check-in of an asset to log the amount used. This could be lamp hours, generator hours or blade size on a wall chaser for example. View, track and document the logging history of your assets!

Bespoke price structure editor

HireHop introduces the new simple price structure designer allowing more flexibility on pricing structures for items on jobs of different durations. Navigate Home-Settings-Company Settings-Edit Price Structures-Custom Price Structures to create and edit your own price structures, setting the period and multipliers required. Once saved, this structure will be available to be allocated to your stock items via the price duration drop-down in stock management. Custom price structures allocated to items override and take precedence over the Job price structure for that item.

New Documents

Navigate Home-Settings-Documents-New to add in two newly created documents.

The ‘project carnet’ document, allows you to print boxed reports of assets, including weights, values and country of origin to create your carnet reports for all jobs within a project in a single click of a button.

If you would like a ‘signature receipt’ on delivery, this document allows the recipient to sign the page, and pressing Save captures the signature with the date/time it was signed.

More Home Page Tiles

Now set management pages of Resource Planner, Hire Stock Management, Resource Management, Sales Stock Management and Address book as your Home page tiles. You can find this option in Home-Settings-Your Settings-Set home page tiles…

New Languages

HireHop is now available in Spanish and Norwegian, with more languages to come! Each user can also view HireHop in English, French, Portuguese and Swedish, by selecting the Language in their User Settings.

Stock Utilisation Report

Stock Utilisation is a new report that is accessible from the Home page, and contains the following columns:

  • Utilisation = How many jobs the item was used on over the period
  • Utilisation % = Percentage of jobs done over period item was used on, so if it was used on half your jobs it would say 50%
  • Qty in stock = How many you currently have in stock
  • Used = How many used over the period, so if 10 jobs used 2 on each job, it would say 20
  • Used % = This is the percentage of how many you hold in stock used on average on each job, so if I have 10 in stock and on average I use 2.5 a job, it would say 25%.
  • Hire In Cost = How much spent hiring it in

Two key columns are the percentage ones as the higher they both are, the more the stock has been used.  If, for example, Used % and Utilisation % are always high and there is quite a high hire in cost, you should definitely be looking at buying more.  On the other hand, if your Utilisation is low and Used % is low, you should perhaps look at selling some off. Click on the Name of the item to open up another report that breaks down the hires over the period into a graph so you can see exactly how it was used.

Help Videos

Need reminding of how a particular module works or have staff who are new to the system?

We have created short how-to videos throughout the system, which are available by clicking here, or on the Help pop-out of the relevant screen.

Smart Categories

Within Hire Stock Management, and when adding items onto your supplying list, the categories now shown are the parent categories only. Click on a parent category to show all items inside that category, as well as all the sub-categories, which can be selected to further filter the list.

New shortcuts, settings and user permissions

  • Creating an invoice, click on the total owing to add a custom item with that amount.
  • Ignore, Confirm or Prevent assets whose Service, PAT Test, or other tests such as Loler, have expired or will be expiring on the particular job, from being checked out. Administrators can set this up in Company Settings, to ignore test failures, confirm failures requiring a double scan to check the asset out, or prevent the asset from being checked onto the job altogether.
  • More user permissions:
    • Override the test settings above by allowing the check out of test failures
    • Allow certain users to only open their own jobs and projects
    • Prevent or allow early checkout of jobs

See if you have shortfalls at a glance

If you have a shortfall of any items on the Supplying list of your Job, the Supplying tab will go red as a warning indicator. As soon as the shortages have been accounted for, the Supplying tab will go back to black.

Email integration

Further email integration features, including integration with Google, 365 and Microsoft Exchange servers.

Speed and security improvements

Continued speed improvements with faster servers and general speed improvements, making some parts of the system 10x faster! HireHop is 100% HTTPS, with even more improved security.

Bug fixes, other minor improvements and much more to come!

 

Posted on by HireHop

Heavy Machinery & Tool Rental Software – Powerful & affordable construction rental company software

Plant & Tool Hire SoftwareAffordable Heavy Machinery, Construction & Tool Rental Software

Until now, the construction equipment rental industry has been limited to antiquated and limited functionality server based software choices, that are not only expensive to run and maintain, they are also overpriced!

With this in mind, the team at HireHop built fully featured and future proof software for large and small companies in the construction and tool rental industry, to give them an easy to use, modern and powerful equipment rental software solution at an affordable price.

Gone are the days when software companies extorted you out of as much money as possible for old out of date software. Today, users like you are more savvy and demand better value for money, as well as the best product for the job, and that’s what HireHop gives you.

Heavy machinery and plant JCB rental softwareConstruction Equipment Rental Software

HireHop has been built by people who have worked in the rental industry, along with invaluable suggestions and feedback from our users, people like you, who have told us what they need. This has enabled us to deliver software perfectly tailored for construction equipment rental companies like yours, giving you the most intuitive, powerful, versatile and feature rich equipment rental software in the world.

We launched HireHop to the tool and construction rental industry at the Executive Hire Show, resulting in large and small companies switching from their existing software to HireHop due to the numerous advantages it gave them.

Heavy machinery, Plant and Tool rental SoftwareModern Heavy Equipment and Tool Rental Software

HireHop has been built with the latest cloud technology.  It is in the cloud, meaning you no longer have to install it, you don’t need to manage your own servers or take backups, and you definitely don’t need to pay for expensive support.

By migrating to HireHop, you will get free updates (we even install them for free), we manage all backups for free, we will give you free support, and best of all, HireHop is affordable. HireHop even drives business your way by recommending you to other users with shortages and adding your rental stock to online directories for free, something no other software in the construction equipment rental industry does.

Don’t get left behind, as the construction and tool rental industry is modernising at an alarming rate, from telematics that is moving to the cloud, even your banking and tax returns live in the cloud.

Meeting Future Needs of Tool and Heavy Equipment Rental Companies

There are always ever changing and unique demands required by tool, construction and heavy machinery rental companies over time. As HireHop is cloud based and embraces all the latest cloud technology, from integrating with your website, as well as G-Suite and Microsoft 365, you are safe in the knowledge that you will not be left behind and will always have an advantage over your competitors.

Secure plant, tool and heavy machinery rental softwareStrong and Stable Equipment Rental Business Software

Being in the cloud makes HireHop safe.  Built on the Amazon AWS $500 billion server network that is used by banks, governments and even NASA, a huge infrastructure that not even the largest heavy machinery and tool rental companies in the world can afford to buy.  HireHop gives you access to this secure global infrastructure without breaking the bank, leaving you with cash to invest into your business, and not waste on overpriced software.

Don’t get left behind paying extortionate fees for old fashioned software, contact us today to arrange a free demo.

Posted on by HireHop

HireHop Rental Software Awarded “Hire Industry Trusted Supplier” Accreditation

Hire Industry Trusted SupplierHireHop has been awarded the prestigious Hire Industry Trusted Supplier (HITS) accreditation from the Hire Association Europe (HAE), passing stringent tests on quality, longevity, safety and ethical business practices.

The Hire Industry Trusted Suppliers scheme has been established to promote the highest levels of quality, competence and safety within the hire industry, giving existing and potential customers reassurances that when choosing a HITS accredited supplier, that they are in safe hands as the supplier is fully committed to maintaining the highest level of standards and practices.

Designed to highlight the most trustworthy suppliers, the HITS scheme will help potential customers make an informed decision, as the HITS accreditation is an additional assurance that background due diligence checks have been undertaken, meaning that by choosing a Hire Industry Trusted Supplier, you are safe in knowledge that the supplier is a sound and solid choice.

Keith Jacobs, Director of HireHop says, “We are extremely proud to receive this important accreditation, and we believe that this is an endorsement of all the hard work and effort that we have put into HireHop for the benefit of our customers.”

At HireHop, being the best, most modern and future proof software in the world is not enough, as we want to go the extra mile to not only give our users the best, but also to reassure them that they are in extremely safe hands by using the HireHop.

Try HireHop today for free, and see why it is setting the standards for hire business software.

Posted on by HireHop

New Updates & Features – October 2018

We strive to improve our cloud based hire business software by actively listening to our users and implementing the features that they need. We have worked tirelessly to bring you new features and functionality based on users feedback and needs, that many of our users have been beta testing over the past few months. We look forward to continuing our journey together to make the best software even better!

Reserving Assets

By popular demand – you can now pre-book specific assets onto jobs!

To reserve an asset onto a future Job, within the Supplying List, simply select the Stock item in question, click on Menu and Reserve Assets.

You will then be greeted with a pop-up screen similar to the below showing all the assets available to be reserved. Choose the asset/s and Save.

Note that the status of the job must be Provisional or onwards in order to reserve assets. 

To enable permission to reserve assets, go Home-Settings-Users-Menu-User Permissions and ensure reserve assets is checked. 

Additionally, from the Asset page, you can now also view all reservations for an asset via the Reserved tab!

Of course, you can also build documents, reports and Carnets with reserved asset fields. Look for fields containing ‘reserved’ through our list of fields, to see all fields available to use for our HireHop Documents, by clicking here.

Use Multiple Email Addresses

Only with HireHop!

All users now have the ability to set up unlimited email accounts and choose which email address an email is sent from. 

Every email is sent from you, saves in your email sent folder AND on the Job too!

Office 365 Integration 

And now with seamless Office 365 integration! Simply enter your 365 hosted email address into your email settings and you’re ready to go. You don’t even need your password. If you are not a 365 user, you can also choose from Microsoft Exchange and Google servers, or simply input your IMAP and SMTP settings. 

Don’t forget you can also sign into HireHop using your Office 365 or Google credentials.

Flagged Status on Assets

Do you ever have an asset that is damaged but still usable? Use the flagged asset status to note any issues but keep the asset in stock.

You can view flagged asset information on the Availability Grid and within a Job too.

First Day of the Week

Each user can now select their own option for the first day of the week. 

Navigate Home-Settings-Your Settings-First Day of the Week to select your preferred option. 

Numbering PDF Pages

Print or Email your PDF Documents in the normal way and check the ‘Add page numbering’ box for a simple way to include page numbers on the bottom of each page.

Exporting Stock Data to Your Website

Generate an export link to integrate to your own website via our powerful API. 

You can generate the data link from the Menu of Hire Stock Management-Get data link, ensuring that an administrator has first set an export key from Company Settings. 

General Improvements and Speed Enhancements

We can’t list every update we do (you’ll get bored reading through the long list), as we regularly release new minor enhancements and features to help make your life easier such as more document fields, system speed increases, additional data fields and the list goes on.

Posted on by HireHop

Software Partners and Re-Sellers Oportunity – Software Product Specialists

Software re-sellerThe hire and rental industry in the USA alone had an annual turnover of $49.4 billion in 2017, made up of 30,000 medium to large companies, collectively employing around 400,000 people.

The market predominantly uses out of date Windows software, and thus has not been able to fully embrace the advantages of cloud software. This is because the cloud offerings have been very poor on functionality, that is until HireHop came along at the end of 2016. HireHop is a cloud software solution written from the ground up for the hire and rental industry, being the only software servicing the hire and rental industry that can be fully customised and is more powerful than all the other offerings. It has a full feature set, utilising groundbreaking technology and methodology invented by the team at HireHop.

Software Partners and Re-Sellers

HireHop is based in the UK and we are offering software product specialists from around the world the opportunity to become partners to re-sell HireHop as well as sell any associated services.

HireHop  is a SAAS product, thus partners will be able to share in subscription charges and provide their own additional services such as training, implementation, document design, hardware sales and software customisations. They will also be able to offer support contracts to all of their local users at whatever appropriate rates they currently follow.

This is a massive opportunity, for software re-sellers that want to expand their operations based around a mature and stable product that already has a significant user base.

If you think this could be of interest to your company, please email us below with some details about your company together with the sort of products you currently resell and support.

Posted on by HireHop

Customisation & Customising Widgets – Customising JQuery UI Widget Ojects

HireHop is completely customisable, you can even add custom fields, all done using the HireHop JavaScript injection method, in which JavaScript files that you have written are inserted into HireHop pages.  If you look at the page source of a HireHop page, you will see <!– PLUGINS –>, it is after here where the JavaScript for your plugins will be inserted.

HireHop has been built from the ground up, developing our own framework that we call NoHTML, amalgamating existing technology and methodology to produce a framework that is easy to use, extendable and enables fast page loading, even on slow internet connections.

Most pages in HireHop are dynamically built on the client machine using JavaScript and jQuery widgets, similar to REACT and JSX, but more simple and of course using the familiar jQuery framework.  For instance, if you load a Job page and inspect the page (press F12 for the browser’s object inspector), you will see a <div> element at the bottom of the page structured like so:

<div id=”notes_tab“></div>

As you can see the above <div> is just an empty div element. If you click on the “Notes” tab, suddenly the above element is populated with elements.  Looking at your browser’s inspector you will also notice that the only data loaded from the server was some JSON and not the code in the notes tab.  The notes tab was built dynamically on the client machine using a custom jQuery UI Widget called $.notes() (internally called $.custom.notes) that is defined in the file /js/notes.js, and that widget used an ajax call to the server to get the data to populate it.

All the widget/JavaScript files on HireHop are compressed for speed, however to see the expanded source just add a .MAX to the end of the file’s name, for example /js/notes.MAX.js is the uncompressed code with hints for /js/notes.js.

To inject JavaScript into your webpages, if you go to Settings->Company Settings, and in Plugins section, add the url of your JavaScript file, which must be on an https server.  You can add multiple URLs which you can separate with a “;” (semi-colon).  All URLs must be to a secure https domain otherwise browsers will probably refuse to load them.

Extending A Widget

As these are jQuery UI Widgets, you can use a type of Object Orientated programming technique to overwrite parts of the HireHop widgets. For example, we are going to create a small plugin that adds a span element with the word Hello after the Refresh button on the notes widget.

First create a JavaScript file on your web or localhost server and add the following code:

$(document).ready(function(){
// Check if the notes widget exists
if(typeof($.custom.notes)!=”undefined” && hh_api_version<=1) {
// Redefine notes widget
$.widget(“custom.notes“, $.custom.notes, {
_init_main: function() {
// Call the old _init_main
this._super(arguments);
// You could put the code here or call a new function you created
this.new_function_name();
},
// Add your own new function into the widget if you want
new_function_name: function() {
// Add an hello after the refresh button
$(“<span>“,{ html:” Hello” }).insertAfter(this.btnRefresh);
},
});
}
});

The above code is available in a file located at https://s.myhirehop.com/plugins/demo.js.

Explaining the code above line by line:

$(document).ready(function(){
First we wait for the document to be ready and all page elements and JavaScript files to be loaded.  In this case this is not necessary as the /js/notes.js file is loaded before the plugin script, however for this example we have left it in for reference.

if(typeof($.custom.notes)!=”undefined” && hh_api_version<=1) {
Next we test to see if the notes widget has been defined, if it has we will proceed to overwrite one part of it.  Here we are also testing the HireHop API version the user is using.  As new versions of HireHop are released, the user will have the option to use it and this makes sure that your plugin is compatible with that version.

$.widget(“custom.notes“, $.custom.notes, {
Here we are initiating merging of a new JavaScript object containing functions into the notes widget.

_init_main: function() {
By naming a function the same as an existing one, it will be overwritten.

this._super(arguments);
This calls the inherited function, being the function we are overwriting.

$(“<span>”,{ html:” Hello” }).insertAfter(this.btnRefresh);
We then add a simple span element containing the word “Hello” after the Refresh button. you could also use $(“<span> Hello</span>”).insertAfter(this.btnRefresh);. To address elements, you should always use the variables assigned to elements and never the element ID’s as most ID’s on HireHop are dynamically created and will be different with every instance.  If the element ID has numbers in it or is not nicely named, definitely don’t use it!

new_function_name: function() { }
Finally, this just demonstrates that you can even add your own functions into the widget.

When you reload the HireHop page, you will see the word Hello after the refresh button if you did everything correctly.

Versioning

A huge advantage of using the HireHop NoHTML framework is that all the JavaScript is cached, resulting in fast page loading as the browser uses the JavaScript files in its cache.  This can be problematic when you update your plugin, as all the users using it, their browsers won’t download the updated version, and instead use their cached version, that is unless they clear their browser cache.

To overcome this, when adding your JavaScript URLs to the Plugins options in settings, you can use a versioning parameter, for example for https://www.mywebsite.com/plugin.js you would enter it as https://www.mywebsite.com/plugin.js?v=1. After an update you can then change it to read https://www.mywebsite.com/plugin.js?v=2 which will force all browsers to reload the updated JavaScript file from your server.

Working Demo

If you add the path https://myhirehop.com/plugins/title_bar.js into your plugins in “Settings->Company settings”, you will see this adds a a small box in the top left on job pages and enables users with permission to do so to switch depots with a drop down in the top right of the screen.  If you look at the source code, you can see how this basic plugin works.

Please note, plugins will not load in the settings page for security reasons and will only load if you have a paid subscription. To disable a plugin on a page, add the url parameter no_plugins=1.

Posted on by HireHop
Posted in API