Hello!
When the year changes, a lot of activities also change: teachers and its not available times also change.
With that in mind, I would like to ask what could be a nice way to "restart" the data in FET.
My steps are:
1) Delete the time constraints referred to teachers (every year the teachers change).
2) If it was necessary for a 2+2 (or 2+2+1) activity to be transformed into 2+(1+1) (or 2+1+1+1) activity (so that the timetable is successfully generated), I remove the latter and keep the original (2+2). That's because it could work with the original activity (and in fact it is recommended at school: try to keep the hours together).
3) I update the teachers' list.
4) This causes that all activities don't have min days between constraints. Adding them manually is too tedious.
5) This forces me to remove all activities and start again every year.
Of course if the changes are not big, I just reassign activities.
In this way, I make sure I'm not skipping activities that are supposed to be the same as last time, but I always run the risk of making mistakes. The negative part is that it is very tedious to do everything again.
Do you have a better way to optimise this process?
Thank you!!
In most cases I don't delete activities nor teacher constraints for the next year. I mainly only modify them. In my opinion much less work and much faster. You just need to work with a checklist, like a pilot or a surgeon. So you want miss something. It is bad if you only do it by your gut feeling. In that case you will probably miss changes and do a lot of mistakes if you try to modify only.
For activities where you don't know if you want to use 2+2 or 2+1+1: I add them as 2+1+1 or 2+2+0(inactive). So it is easy to modify them from 2+2 to 2+1+1 and back again to 2+2, since I never need to delete them. I only set the last subactivity active/deactive and modify the duration of the second subactivity.
Thank you for your suggestions!
Quote from: Volker Dirr on February 20, 2025, 12:25:16 AMIn most cases I don't delete activities nor teacher constraints for the next year. I mainly only modify them. In my opinion much less work and much faster. You just need to work with a checklist, like a pilot or a surgeon. So you want miss something. It is bad if you only do it by your gut feeling. In that case you will probably miss changes and do a lot of mistakes if you try to modify only.
I agree.
Quote from: Volker Dirr on February 20, 2025, 12:25:16 AMFor activities where you don't know if you want to use 2+2 or 2+1+1: I add them as 2+1+1 or 2+2+0(inactive). So it is easy to modify them from 2+2 to 2+1+1 and back again to 2+2, since I never need to delete them. I only set the last subactivity active/deactive and modify the duration of the second subactivity.
I don't understand how you change so quickly between 2+1+1 and 2+2+0.
Firstly, I always start with 2+2 (your 2+2+0) because that's the way the school wants. This adds min days between constraint.
Then, if things go wrong, how you manage to activate the others? I mean, warnings will start appearing, and I tend to have 0 warnings. Maybe I care too much about warnings which is not good when a new year starts.
Again, thank you for your answer
It is very easy to add automatically min days between activities constraints: use the function Spread activities evenly over the week.
Not sure what you mean with "warnings will start appearing".
If just add in fact 2+2+1 and uncheck the "active" checkbox with at the last sub activity. So it is in fact 2+2+0 = 2+2.
And If I want to modify, then i check the "active" checkbox again and modify the duration of the 2nd sub activity from 2 to 1. That's all.
This is much faster then deleting and adding activities.
If you have many (maybe 30 or more activities like this), then it is probably faster, if you delete that activities and import the activities by a modified csv file (Modified in Excel, LibreOffice Sheets, ... Not modified in an easy text editor, that is too slow). That is the fastest variant. But it has the disadvantage, that you will losse constraints that refers to sub activity numbers directly.