Hello,
I am a neophyte with FET. I am a math tutor at a small private school, Escuela Verde, here in Costa Rica. The school has grades 1-7 and about 100 students. I agreed to make an attempt at the class scheduling task after it consumed many, many hours of staff time and they were quite unhappy with the results of their efforts.
Because of the small number of teachers, I find that FET works best for our situation if I manually schedule in FET the more important classes using time constraints, relying on FET to disclose conflicts.
(Please note that I use the term "grade" to refer to all of the students in a particular year of school, i.e., Grade 2 students are in their second year of school. As well, I use the term "class" to refer to, for example, all activities of Math 3, whether the class meets for 1 period per week or 10 periods per week.)
I recently encountered a problem for which I have been unable to find a solution. When I began scheduling Grade 4, I discovered that I had to go back to make changes to the Grade 3 schedule. All of the Grade 3 classes had previously been established and correctly time-constrained. The necessary changes involved modifying the time constraints for 2 classes so that the classes would occur at different times from those previously scheduled.
I believe that I made the necessary changes correctly and the classes appeared to be correct in the Activities window. (See Activities.png attached.) The problem is with the Espanol 3 class. When I tried to generate a new schedule, the error message
"Activity with id=69 has no allowed slot - please correct that" appeared. Espanol 3 appears to be correct in the Activities window. But when I look at Espanol 3 in the Time Constraints window (see Constraints.png attached), I observe that there is no activity with an Id of 68, and 2 activities with an Id of 69.
How can I correct this situation, and how can I assure that I do not make the same mistake again?
Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
In the second dialog (constraints): Just select the first constraint (activity ID=69), press modify and change the activity to ID 68.
Yes, it is easy to correct.
One thing, though: do you think you discovered a FET bug? I mean the activity ID was 68, then FET incorrectly made it 69? (in the first constraint.) If affirmative, please try to remember the steps you did, so we can fix the bug.
Thank you so much. I thought of modifying the activity number but I didn't know how, and I didn't realize that it was pointing to the WRONG activity; I assumed that the value of the activity ID had somehow become clobbered.
Regarding your second reply, as I stated above, that was my original thought. I don't believe now that it was an FET error or a system error. I think that in changing the time constraints, I myself modified the ID of activity 68 to 69 by failing to CLOSE the modify window after making a change to an activity. The mechanics of how I did it are unclear to me but I think it was "operator error."
Thanks again for your prompt reply (or replies).