manual planning

[math_user]

I have to assign the rooms for the activities a colleague planned manually (without timetabling software ...) and my activities (planned using FET of course!).
It would be great to have a new window "manual planning" where I can enter teacher(s), students, subject and the time slots for all subactivities (preferred starting time, 100%, permanently locked) - all in the same window (instead of entering the preferred times as a constraint afterwards).

Window "Add manually planned activity":
below "Duration": starting time or period with day and start hour to select

[Volker Dirr]

Why do you need to assign them manualy? Why can't you add constraints that simply do the same as you do manualy?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Volker, I think it is a matter of commodity of data introduction.

[Volker Dirr]

I fear i don't understand you reason. What do you mean? Please explain.
I guess he just don't know how to do it even it might be very simply possible with FET. So let's see the reason before adding something that might be surplus. I fear he just want because he always done it manualy and he don't know how to add constraints for that.
Also: If he have got room problems: Why generating a timetable if you see LATER (TO LATE) that there is a room problem. It will be much more clever to enter room constraints before generating, because in that case you will get a perfect timetable with rooms added already.
I guess he only need it to "swap" some rooms later. I do that also sometimes if there is no other way to do it. But instead of doing it manual at the end, I solved that pretty easy: First of all i added only common room constraints. By that i already got a good timetable. I just needed to swap a few rooms then, to do it a bit more perfect. I do that by activating a few room constraints 99.99999% constraints on the generated timetable. So just a few rooms are not in the "perfect" room. But that doesn't matter to much, since it is mathematically impossible to solve it perfect in my situation. That is why I can't add 100% weight to a few room constraints. I don't add the 99.99999% constraint at the beginning, because generating is much to slow then and the results are not better then without them at the beginning.
But lets see why he need it. Maybe there is a reason that we don't see at the moment.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I fear i don't understand your reason. What do you mean? Please explain.
I guess he just don't know how to do it even it might be very simply possible with FET. So let's see the reason before adding something that might be surplus.

Maybe not in the official FET, but as a custom version, if you consider it surplus.

I think math user wants in the add activity dialog, for each component of the activity, the preferred day and hour.

[math_user]

Thank you for your answers.

I only need manual planning because my colleague wants to keep his system with "Excel planning" ... Perhaps I can convince him later to hand it over to me and FET - but at the moment I have to enter his plan (fixed times) manually and do the rooms using FET. Currently we have enough rooms - no problems there. I just have to enter the number of students for each subject (as the students can choose) so that larger classes are in larger rooms.

Would it be possible to add a locked (by default disabled) setting "allow manual planning (set preferred starting time for each subactivity directly)"? In this case, one could choose the starting time of each subactivity in the "add activity" window - otherwise this would not be visible.
It is just a matter of convenience: Enter starting time in the same window instead of creating a 100% constraint for each subactivity.

I think math user wants in the add activity dialog, for each component of the activity, the preferred day and hour.

Yes, that would be great! If there is not too much work to do ...

[Volker Dirr]

but what are the constraints that the excel guy used? i bet in fact it is only a fist full constraints he used. so why adding hundreds of constraints that a very difficult to check and/or to modify instead of adding a fist full constraints that are easy to check and easy to modify?

[Liviu Lalescu]

I did it, please get it from http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download/custom/math-user/ and let me know if it works as expected.

[math_user]

Finally, I have had the chance to test the custom version.
It is absolutely perfect!
Thank you very much for your extra work, Liviu!

[Liviu Lalescu]

I'm glad it works!

I am sorry that it cannot make it to the official, so that you can always have the latest version. If more users will want this, we'll reconsider.

[math_user]

I am sorry that it cannot make it to the official

No problem! I am happy to have the custom version!