Active flag for teachers

[math]

Hi!

I was wondering if it may be possible to introduce an active flag to teacher configuration (i.e. Data -> Teachers).

Background: beside a core team of permanent teachers we have a large team of external teachers and contracted students. If somebody participates in teaching for the first time, I'm adding him/her to the fet configuration as teacher. For the sake of laziness I'm only adding, but never removing, because it happens quite often that external teachers return in later semesters. Even permanent staff is inactive from time to time, e.g. during sabbaticals or visiting reasearch at other universities. And in fact, I do not only have to enter the name to the FET configuration but also the internal ID from our SAP system. So I just want to omit the overhead of adding this information each and every semester again.

But the downside of this approach is that my teacher listboxes grow in size quite fast. When defining activities or setting filters, I have to search in a large list of teachers that might be significantly smaller, if only I would remove inactive teachers.

Having an active flag would allow me to quickly toggle the status of all teachers at the beginning of the semester. If a teacher is toggled inactive, he/she would not be added to listboxes. He/she would be also omitted in the schedule generation, i.e. no schedule is generated for this person.

The only difficuly I see is how to handle this situation: what happens if a teachers gets toggled inactive while there are activities on his name? I would suggest the following:
- When a teacher gets toggled inactive, FET checks whether there are activities for him/her. If yes, a warning dialog is displayed saying "There are activities for this teacher. Are you sure?" If "no" is pressed, the teacher remains active. If "yes" is pressed, the teacher gets toggled inactive.
- If FET discoveres an inactive teacher at schedule generation time, it displays a warning ("Activity 1234 has been assigned to an inactive teachers), but ignores the inactive teacher. (i.e. it schedules the activity as if the inactive teacher wouldn't have been assigned to the activiy).

This behaviour would be beneficial for community activities, e.g. jour fixe meetings. I simply add all relevant teachers to the activity, not caring if they are actually teaching this semester or not. By analyzing the active flag, FET would only schedule active teachers to these activities.

The other option to handle this situation would be to reject toggling a teacher as inactive while he/she has activities.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I will add this in the TODO, for now at least.

[math]

Thanks a lot for considering it.

[Nagendra]

This is a nice idea