FET Forum

Hi,

after inputing almost all the data from my school, I would suggest some improvements for this great piece of software.

First of all, I must say I've used version 5.7.0 because it's the one that comes with the last version of kubuntu. I have read in the news sections the changelog and removed the only one that I've seen already implemented (the one referring to multiple activity tags for an activity), but sorry if I repeat something.

- Ther's no filter in "Activities not overlapping" constraint, so it makes hard to select them when you have a lot of activities.
- When filtering a group, there should be a checkbox to show all its subgroups. So, for example, it could be possible to show all activities of a whole year.
- Some constraints dialogs (for example "Activity preferred room", "Activity preferred starting time") are much wider than my screen (using kde 4.2, 1024x768 display, I can give more details if needed)
- It would be great FET to assign rooms to activities that have no constraint about it. Besides of avoiding to put manually a room for each activity, it would allow to check if there are enough rooms for everything. It would be useful to associate a priority range number to each room, so in case there's more than one option for an activity the one with the largest number would be choosen.
- In my school the timetable is divided in morning (from 8:00 to 14:30h) and afternoon (15:00 to 17:00h). In the morning there's a break from 11:00 to 11:30h. I have defined this break as an hour of the timetable, but not allowing activities for any set of students in this slot. The reason is to plan the surveillance of the teachers in this slot. There must be always 2 teachers looking after the pupils during this period, so I define activities without students. The problem is that if a teacher does not have surveillance at break time, it should not count as a gap. If I define this slot as break in "Misc time constraints" then I can not define the surveillance activities.
- The lunch break is therefore from 14:30 to 15:00 (I have not defined it as a slot of the timetable, because there are no pupils in the school, they are at home having dinner). As it's a short time, often is convenient for many teachers to avoid having class from 13:30 to 14:30 slot and from 15:00 to 16:00 slot in the same day. Maybe something like a constraint of incompatible slots for some/all teachers would do the trick (and could apply to other situations).
- We try that all the teachers work maximum 2 afternoons per week. This has been easy to define with "All teachers work in an hourly interval max days per week". But we try also that teachers who work two days per week in the afternoon to have a free morning. I don't know how to define this situation.
I have seen some custom versions of FET considering the morning / afternoon division. I have to read them carefully, but I think they are not exactly my situation. For example, we don't want the condition "Teachers can only have lesson either in morning or afternoon. never both"...

Thanks for your attention,

  ßingen.

Just a quick question: you use Spanish or English (language of FET)? The constraints dialog which are too wide are add, modify or constraints list? Can you attach a screen shot?

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First of all, I must say I've used version 5.7.0 because it's the one that comes with the last version of kubuntu. I have read in the news sections the changelog and removed the only one that I've seen already implemented (the one referring to multiple activity tags for an activity), but sorry if I repeat something.

Please try to compile latest, there are many improvements. I can help.

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- Ther's no filter in "Activities not overlapping" constraint, so it makes hard to select them when you have a lot of activities.

It is done in future 5.10.0 (hopefully released tomorrow)

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- When filtering a group, there should be a checkbox to show all its subgroups. So, for example, it could be possible to show all activities of a whole year.

I'll think about it. Do you suggest in activities dialog, make a checkbox to show all activities of students sets which are included in the current students set displayed?

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- Some constraints dialogs (for example "Activity preferred room", "Activity preferred starting time") are much wider than my screen (using kde 4.2, 1024x768 display, I can give more details if needed)

Maybe because you have an old version. I checked and everything is OK, in English & Spanish.

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- It would be great FET to assign rooms to activities that have no constraint about it. Besides of avoiding to put manually a room for each activity, it would allow to check if there are enough rooms for everything. It would be useful to associate a priority range number to each room, so in case there's more than one option for an activity the one with the largest number would be choosen.

Too difficult and not FET usual notation.

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- In my school the timetable is divided in morning (from 8:00 to 14:30h) and afternoon (15:00 to 17:00h). In the morning there's a break from 11:00 to 11:30h. I have defined this break as an hour of the timetable, but not allowing activities for any set of students in this slot. The reason is to plan the surveillance of the teachers in this slot. There must be always 2 teachers looking after the pupils during this period, so I define activities without students. The problem is that if a teacher does not have surveillance at break time, it should not count as a gap. If I define this slot as break in "Misc time constraints" then I can not define the surveillance activities.
- The lunch break is therefore from 14:30 to 15:00 (I have not defined it as a slot of the timetable, because there are no pupils in the school, they are at home having dinner). As it's a short time, often is convenient for many teachers to avoid having class from 13:30 to 14:30 slot and from 15:00 to 16:00 slot in the same day. Maybe something like a constraint of incompatible slots for some/all teachers would do the trick (and could apply to other situations).
- We try that all the teachers work maximum 2 afternoons per week. This has been easy to define with "All teachers work in an hourly interval max days per week". But we try also that teachers who work two days per week in the afternoon to have a free morning. I don't know how to define this situation.
I have seen some custom versions of FET considering the morning / afternoon division. I have to read them carefully, but I think they are not exactly my situation. For example, we don't want the condition "Teachers can only have lesson either in morning or afternoon. never both"...

I'll think about that. Added in TODO.

Maybe for gaps problem, choose the teachers who do the surveillance and mark the rest unavailable in some slots (not available are not counted as gaps).

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- When filtering a group, there should be a checkbox to show all its subgroups. So, for example, it could be possible to show all activities of a whole year.

How do you suggest to name this check box? "Show all contained subsets" is good? Do you have better suggestions?

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- When filtering a group, there should be a checkbox to show all its subgroups. So, for example, it could be possible to show all activities of a whole year.

How do you suggest to name this check box? "Show all contained subsets" is good? Do you have better suggestions?

I have made this :-) The name I chosen for the check box is "Recursive". Do you think is a good name? I made it normally unchecked - do you suggest to make it default checked?

There is a new snapshot on http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download/test/ with this feature, please test it and report results soon. I will release on 1 July evening if everything is OK.

downloaded and will test ASAP

OK. I changed the string of the check box to "Show related", but I cannot update the snapshot now. The snapshot still contains the old string "Related". The functionality is the same.

I hope to release in about 6 hours from now, so let me know asap if there are any problems.

I don't really understand the functionality of the Related checkbox. Whenever I check it, everything disappars from the information box. sorry to be so useless

you must select a students set and check/unceck the related box to understand.

do it one time with a year, one time with a group and one time with a subgroup.

Do you understand now?

Yes, like Volker said, please select a students set and check/un-check the check box.

Yes, I know the description of the activity is not updated, you have to select an activity from the list in the left. The thing is that the list of activities on the left is updated (I modified and next release will update the activity to the first in the list. I did that before you reported it :-)

Please let us know if now you understood/can work with that.

Hi,

a little bit late, so I've downloaded the recently released 5.10.0. I'm now compiling it, and would report my results.

See you,

  ßingen.

Hi, meanwhile it's compiling, some comments:

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- It would be great FET to assign rooms to activities that have no constraint about it. Besides of avoiding to put manually a room for each activity, it would allow to check if there are enough rooms for everything. It would be useful to associate a priority range number to each room, so in case there's more than one option for an activity the one with the largest number would be choosen.

Too difficult and not FET usual notation.

Really difficult? Probably I have no knowledge enough, and I haven't read the fet source code, but imagine something like that:
Now there are some activities that remain without a classroom assigned, if there's no constraint related (maybe I'm missing something?). The idea would be, once the timetable is generated, to go through all the activities without room and assign it the first room available at this time slot. If there's a priority number for the rooms, the order to choose "the first room" would be this number, so this would mean the available room with the largest number.
Actually, it's more or less what I would do if I had to do it manually.

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Maybe for gaps problem, choose the teachers who do the surveillance and mark the rest unavailable in some slots (not available are not counted as gaps).

Yes, maybe for some situations, or for some teachers. But in my school there are always, at every time slot, one or two teachers of "surveillance". Their tasks are to look after students who are made out of class by behaviour reasons, or that feel ill, to go to the classroom if a teacher has not come, etc. These surveillances count equal than a break surveillance in order to make the timetable. So my strategy was the following: I defined two groups G1 and G2 (we call these surveillances "guardia") and as many activities as hours dedicated to these surveillances for every teacher (not everybody has the same number, depending on several factors). So FET distributes this hours in a random way, maybe at break time, or maybe at normal hours. So I don't  decide previously who makes surveillance at break time, and if a teacher complains about it, I can say it's a software fault ;-)
But if a teacher does not have break time surveillance I don't want this slot to be counted as a gap.

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How do you suggest to name this check box? "Show all contained subsets" is good? Do you have better suggestions?
(...)
I have made this Smiley The name I chosen for the check box is "Recursive". Do you think is a good name? I made it normally unchecked - do you suggest to make it default checked?

Yes, both names are ok for me. And also default unchecked.

Thanks again,

  ßingen.

Ok, it finished compiling.

The wide dialogs disappeared, and the check-box  for the subgroups works great! Maybe it would be useful in all the filters, including the "add constraint" ones.

I've seen the new filter in "activities not overlapping" constraint. It's also a very great improvement the "select output directory" option in settings.

Very good work!

  ßingen.

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The wide dialogs disappeared,

This was a GNU/Linux platform bug. In Windows, the combobox can be shrunk. In GNU/Linux, it takes the maximum size to hold data. I made the dimension of combo box maximum screen width - 120 pixels. I hope Qt will solve this bug. I'll report it. So I can get rid of this maximum size and all users will see the max size when window is maximizes.

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and the check-box  for the subgroups works great! Maybe it would be useful in all the filters, including the "add constraint" ones.

I am so lazy to do that :-) There are very many dialogs. And some filters do not have space for this checkbox. And the code is pretty large and I don't know how to make a global function.

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I've seen the new filter in "activities not overlapping" constraint. It's also a very great improvement the "select output directory" option in settings.

Yes, reported by Yush Yuen and Massimo Mancini :-)

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Very good work!

This release has a very long change log :-) Thank you for your suggestions!

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Really difficult? Probably I have no knowledge enough, and I haven't read the fet source code, but imagine something like that:
Now there are some activities that remain without a classroom assigned, if there's no constraint related (maybe I'm missing something?). The idea would be, once the timetable is generated, to go through all the activities without room and assign it the first room available at this time slot. If there's a priority number for the rooms, the order to choose "the first room" would be this number, so this would mean the available room with the largest number.
Actually, it's more or less what I would do if I had to do it manually.

Yes, not that difficult, but complicated a bit and does not respect FET notation in a way, because each constraint must be checked for at generation time. I talked with others on the same matter, now your idea of solving it seems a bit nicer, but still I don't like this kind of constraint.

You could add an activity tag for each activity and constraint preferred rooms, all rooms, for this tag.

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Yes, maybe for some situations, or for some teachers. But in my school there are always, at every time slot, one or two teachers of "surveillance". Their tasks are to look after students who are made out of class by behaviour reasons, or that feel ill, to go to the classroom if a teacher has not come, etc. These surveillances count equal than a break surveillance in order to make the timetable. So my strategy was the following: I defined two groups G1 and G2 (we call these surveillances "guardia") and as many activities as hours dedicated to these surveillances for every teacher (not everybody has the same number, depending on several factors). So FET distributes this hours in a random way, maybe at break time, or maybe at normal hours. So I don't  decide previously who makes surveillance at break time, and if a teacher complains about it, I can say it's a software fault ;-)
But if a teacher does not have break time surveillance I don't want this slot to be counted as a gap.

It might be easy to make that in a custom version. Because each slots can be or not considered a gap in teacher's timetable. And the good thing is that you are using GNU/Linux and I don't need to compile for you a Windows version. Let me know if you agree on a custom version and I'll send the code. Tell me the days and the hours when gaps should not be counted for teachers, 0 indexed. For instance, Monday first hour is day 0, hour 0. I do not promise a fast implementation, but I might do it soon.

QuoteBut in my school there are always, at every time slot, one or two teachers of "surveillance". Their tasks are to look after students who are made out of class by behaviour reasons, or that feel ill, to go to the classroom if a teacher has not come, etc.

We do it this way:
add a subject "surveillance".
add activities to teacher that should to surveillance. (Activities with teacher name, no student, subject surveillance and duration 1. (some have 2, but in that case you should think about removing the min n days constraint.)
so every teacher see his surveillance in the table.
now you need to care about a good schedule.
add one (or two) pseudo rooms.
add constraint subject prefer that one (or two) pseudo room.
so there are max one (or two) surveillance avtivities in a single timeslot.
maybe also think about adding a not available constraint to that room. I do that with the last period, because we don't do surveillance in the last period.

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You could add an activity tag for each activity and constraint preferred rooms, all rooms, for this tag.

Ok, I will try this way.

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It might be easy to make that in a custom version. Because each slots can be or not considered a gap in teacher's timetable. And the good thing is that you are using GNU/Linux and I don't need to compile for you a Windows version. Let me know if you agree on a custom version and I'll send the code. Tell me the days and the hours when gaps should not be counted for teachers, 0 indexed. For instance, Monday first hour is day 0, hour 0. I do not promise a fast implementation, but I might do it soon.

Thank you very much, but I will try to handle it in another way. Maybe choosing before which teachers will do break surveillances and which ones will do the other surveillances. I have to try...
Besides, I think it's better to concentrate the efforts in global solutions to improve the software for everybody as much as we can.
If I can't solve it anyway I will tell you, but for now I hope the custom version not to be necessary. Thank you very much anyway.

  ßingen.

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We do it this way:
add a subject "surveillance".
add activities to teacher that should to surveillance. (Activities with teacher name, no student, subject surveillance and duration 1.
(...)

Yes, I did it more or less this way. My problem was with the break surveillances and the gap counting, but I think I will be able to solve it, maybe marking some teachers as not available at break time.

Thanks,

  ßingen.