Re: Items for Rent

Hi Eric,

In regards to your first question, the fact that the SDTT throws an error
when there's no price doesn't mean your markup is invalid. The only thing
it means is that it won't generate a rich snippet (in general SDTT errors
mean the provided markup isn't eligable for Google specific features).

Which makes sense in this case as Product rich snippets normally show
prices (and reviews if they've been provided). And if there's no price they
won't show anything extra.

Something I wouldn't worry about if I were you.

As for your second question, you can express an item is for rent by adding
a 'businessFunction' property to the 'Offer' as such (JSON-LD example):

"@type":"Offer",
"businessFunction":"http://purl.org/goodrelationsv1#LeaseOut

And as for "RentAction", instead of using 'landlord' or 'realEstateAgent'
you can simply use the 'agent' property instead.

Does that answer your questions?

Op 8 mrt. 2017 17:56 schreef "Eric Franzon" <eric.franzon@gmail.com>:

Hi All,

I'm working on a project that involves a company (I'll call them
"RentalCorp"), that rents electronic equipment and services, I'm running
into some limitations of the schema.org vocab, and I'm wondering if anyone
here has found workarounds.

Some background:

Rental, as a concept, seems largely limited to real estate and
automobiles. RentAction
<https://schema.org/RentAction>has only two properties unique to its type:
landlord and realEstateAgent.

Product <https://schema.org/Product>is the accurate type for many of the
pages I'm marking up, and intend to use *many *of Product's properties. I'd
also like to include "Offer <https://schema.org/Offer>" so that I can
describe "availability" and "condition" of items (e.g. this microphone is
"Like New" and "In Stock").

One big limitation I'm running into is in trying to describe the
relationship between "Price," which is mandated by some data linters
(notably Google's SDTT) and the concept of "request a quote."

This company -- and I suspect other companies/industries -- builds a quote
for each customer based on numerous factors, and does not publish pricing
(or even price ranges) for individual products or services that might be
part of that quote.

Price does allow for both number and text datatypes, but even text seems to
be very constrained. For example, I cannot get the following to pass linter
tests. Note my attempted workaround by using PriceSpecification to describe
this textually:


<script type='application/ld+json'>
{
  "@context":"http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/product/acme-microphone-x2000/
product-x2000#product",
  "name": "ACME Microphone X2000",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "offeredBy": {
    "@id": "https://www.example.com/about#company"
    },
    "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock",
    "itemCondition": "NewCondition",
    "name": "ACME Microphone X2000 for rent",
  "price": "Available For Rent",
    "priceSpecification": {
      "@type": "PriceSpecification",
      "name": "Available for Rent"
      }
   }
}
</script>


NOTE: I also went down the path of trying potentialAction > RentAction
<https://schema.org/RentAction>, but that, too, expects Price with the same
constraints.

QUESTION 1: Has anyone had success describing items for rent that do not
have a numeric price specified?

QUESTION 2: Does anyone have thoughts about or see need for expanding the
available terms describing rental items generally?

Cheers,
--Eric

-- 
*Eric Axel Franzon*