I'm using MAPR for some course planning and it's great. I love the idea of "allow skipping of activities." I wish I could set which activities could be skipped.
Each student chooses his courses, with ranking 1-4. I have an activity tag for each choice. I would love to allow skipping of activities with rank 4, but not with ranks 1-3. The student also has reserve choices 5-6, which I could then go through and add in for students whose 4th choice was skipped. I'm trying to come up with a way to do this using tricks by adding an extra "room" that catches all activities that can't be placed elsewhere, but I'm struggling.
I would also love to set the threshold for when an activity is skipped. For example, if I check allow skipping of activities and generate 100 timetables, some will skip 5 activities, some 6, some as many as 12.
In my classic style, I've figured out a way to do what I want, though it's not particularly elegant and would be very time consuming with a large number of subjects. I use a subject has a preferred room 99%, followed by subject + tag has a preferred room 100% for choices (tags) 1-3, and finally subject + tag has a set of preferred room 100% for choice 4 where the set of preferred rooms is the normal subject room and one "catch-all" room.
If anyone stumbles across this post looking for tips, I'm using it to build options blocks (or carriers, if that's your preferred lingo) containing non-conflicting classes.