History might include generated timetables

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello!

I thought and it is possible for the History to include the generated timetable at each stage. Would it be useful?

[Vangelis Karafillidis]

Hello Liviu.

What do you mean? I.e. what's the difference between this option and simply keeping backups of the generated timetables?

Vangelis.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Yes, keeping backups of the generated timetables.

Each time the user will generate a new timetable, it will be kept in the History as a new restore point, along with the data at that moment.

The History might become too full with these timetables instead of real data changes.

[Vangelis Karafillidis]

Hm... I think that there are some useful situations:
1) For new users, it's going to be safer, since they are not going to erase their timetables accidentally. For example, a new user might forget that he/she needs to change the filename before generating again, in order to keep his/her already generated timetables.
2) When modifying timetables, the user might experiment for better results. But this might lead him/her to erase the successfully generated timetables, and at the same time get an impossible timetable. The history option you suggested is going to solve this problem.
Regarding the problem of the History becoming too full, I think that the best idea is to keep in the history backups of the generated timetables (.fet files), without the other files (.html, etc). When the user "loads" a previously generated .fet file from the History, FET is going to generate the timetable again and export the other files (html, etc) in a single second!

Vangelis.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I meant History full, not memory. If the user generates say multiple, 100, the History will contain only these timetables.

Of course in the memory we'll keep only the allocation of the activities.

[Volker Dirr]

hmm... maybe optional only?
Or maybe saving the seed only?

[Liviu Lalescu]

I thought some more. Not very easy, since we must compute internal structure again. And it will make a mess, since users are interested, in the history, in the data changes, not in the timetables.

Maybe making a separate History of timetables only.

We arrive again at approach used by aSc Timetables, when saving a file saves also the timetable, and opening a file opens also the timetable. But I kind of not like this, and I think we solved this problem with _data_and_timetable.fet solution files.

Also, I am very afraid of introducing bugs, since there are not many testers with FET.