Viewing timetables

[samantha.goddard]

Hello!

When viewing the group timetables in the 'View timetables / View student timetables / day horizontal' tab, is it possible to hide the long list of subgroups that appear in each time slot so that the timetable is easier to view?

I am spending a lot of time adjusting the size of the boxes to be able to check for distribution of activities.

Many thanks for your advice! Samantha

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello,

Unfortunately, we did not have this problem addressed in the official FET. If you need, I could try a customization for you, with different solutions possible: (i) Hide subgroups, as you say, (ii) Keep the size of each table cell small, or (iii)... other possible solutions. I am not sure if I could add this in the official FET - maybe as a suggestion in the TODO for now.

Could you also see the HTML timetables? You can hide the subgroups in these timetables, with a minor change to the CSS file; Volker knows better, but I think I could also direct you, if you want.

[Volker Dirr]

hmmm.... i wonder a bit about "many subgroups" in "groups" timetable. It sound's for me like you added a lot of subgroups to activities instead of just adding a single group with those subgroups. By that you will see only that single group name instead of the many subgroup names.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Indeed, Volker, Samantha has a more complicated students' structure. It is difficult for her to create groups containing these subgroups, because they need to be added from the interface.

[samantha.goddard]

Thanks Volker and Liviu for your feedback. Sorry not to reply before - I was saturated and had to take a break from timetabling. I have forwarded my final file to Liviu now so maybe when you see my file, you will have some suggestions for how I can make my viewing of the schedules easier.

Maybe I should hide the subgroups on the html files but I find the colour coding on the FET viewing easier for checking.

Thanks to you both!

[Darren McDonald]

Hi Samantha—a little bit of customization to the CSS file that FET generates would easily allow you to selectively show/hide elements (like subgroups) and to add colour to the HTML output. How best to do this depends on a couple of things.

To get started, once you've generated the timetable, use a text editor (Notepad++, Atom, etc.) to open the css file in the directory that contains all the HTML files, and paste the following into, say, line 9.

Code Select Expand

/*---------altered text beginning---------*/
body, td {
  font-family:Verdana; /* sets the font to Verdana for print output */
}

tr.foot {
display:none;
}

span.activitytag {
  color:green;
font-size:smaller;
}

tr.line3, div.line3 {
  font-size: smaller;
  color:blue;
}

tr.studentsset, div.studentsset {
display:none;
}
/*---------altered text end---------*/


Note that, every time you generate a timetable this CSS file will be overwritten, so you might want to create an altered CSS file and store it in a separate location, then replace the "fresh" CSS file with your altered version after generating. The alterations suggested above work with HTML files set to level 4 (which I use) or higher (but might work with a lower level as well).

I usually use activity tags ("Mathematics", "Science", etc.), then alter the CSS file to show each in a different colour (Math gets coloured red, Science blue, etc.). To do this, just search the CSS file for the activity tag entry for Mathematics, and add a colour reference of your choice.

For example, my default CSS file would contain this entry:

Code Select Expand

span.at_47 { /* activity tag Mathematics */

}

which I would change to

Code Select Expand

span.at_47 { /* activity tag Mathematics */
  color:red;
}

A useful list of CSS colours references can be found here.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Thank you, Darren, but Samantha needs to see the timetables from the FET interface, and she has many subgroups in some activities, making the students' timetables days horizontal look bad.

[Darren McDonald]

Thank you, Darren, but Samantha needs to see the timetables from the FET interface, and she has many subgroups in some activities, making the students' timetables days horizontal look bad.

I think the CSS suggestions may help with this (I have the same issue with my Grade 11 and 12 classes, as my groups for those grades are real students, so each activity has a long list of groups). The CSS modification

Code Select Expand

tr.studentsset, div.studentsset {
display:none;
}

will hide the student sets in the HTML files, making it much more readable when many groups/subgroups are used.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Oh, Darren, Samantha wants in the FET interface.

In another point of view, in the new FET-5.46.0 I added a feature which allows you to easily create overlapping years/groups. You can use "Add existing" from the Groups or Subgroups dialogs. In this way, you won't need to add many groups to each activity, but create additional years and add only a single year to an activity (or, if you input real life students = FET subgroups, do this for groups and subgroups).

[Darren McDonald]

Oh, Darren, Samantha wants in the FET interface.
...

I see—if Samantha needs to be working within the FET interface, then the CSS fixes wouldn't be helpful, but if she's only viewing the timetable data, using the HTML fileswith these CSS fixes might help. 

[Liviu Lalescu]

Indeed, but she told me/us that she specifically needed this in the interface.

I hope that with the new feature the problem will be overcome.