hello and thank you for this remarkably powerful software!
I've just downloaded FET and have begun to read through the documentation and feel myself getting overwhelmed. Since you guys are so helpful on these forums, I thought I might just ask a newbie question here.
We are a large department at a university; we teach many languages as well as accompanying civilizational, etc., courses. Basically, I would just like to use FET to make sure that we don't have course conflicts. For example, we would need to make sure that at least some of our courses in Hindi and Persian do not overlap with our single Sanskrit course, as we want to make sure that the latter is available to students enrolled in the former. There are also certain required courses which must be available to everyone. The issue is only timing availability (not classroom, etc., availability, which is taken care of by the university). I take it it's a simple affair for FET to handle our situation?
I have a csv file with all of our courses. Is it possible to import all that data (and simply add whatever is missing) rather than manually enter everything in? And if so, could you point me to the format required?
Thanks for your help and apologies for not wading through all the documentation in advance. Some pointers to save me wasted time with trial and error would be much appreciated!
Sorry, just to be clear: we would be specifying the times for all courses (rather than having FET allot them for us) and using FET to verify that we have no conflicts.
For import/export format: please open the first German sample (german_subact_constr.fet), see it's years/groups/subgroups structure, and export it from the FET menu. Then see the format.
Unfortunately, you cannot import/export the time constraints which lock activities to time slots. But you might develop your own script/program to do that, knowing the XML structure for such a constraint, which is simple and is written in the .fet XML file directly, like below:
---
<ConstraintActivityPreferredStartingTime>
<Weight_Percentage>100</Weight_Percentage>
<Activity_Id>2</Activity_Id>
<Preferred_Day>Wednesday</Preferred_Day>
<Preferred_Hour>15:00</Preferred_Hour>
<Permanently_Locked>true</Permanently_Locked>
<Active>true</Active>
<Comments></Comments>
</ConstraintActivityPreferredStartingTime>
---
You can generate on a locked file and FET will point you to the conflicts, as it is generating the file (it will be very fast). But to obtain a final solution you need a perfect conflict-free solution to exist.