My school administration did rather untimely changes to the timetable structure. I believe that such a change should rather happen before or after an academic year, I guess. Anyway, term 3 has just started and we have switched from 45 to 30 minutes periods.
School administration now wants to have the two timetables in place, for term 1 and term 2 it’s the old timetable with 45 minutes periods and for term 3 I should use the new 30 minutes periods timetable. The courses are basically identical with the same assigned participants.
Being quite familiar with timetables in Gibbon and also knowing that it’s rather flexible, I thought that this would be a rather easy task, but I’m facing unexpected challenges. Anyway, I’m optimistic that the worst is a little hacking here and there.
What I have done is, I added the new timetable structure to the current timetable and imported the new periods. This worked beautifully but, as you may have guessed, all current periods are dropped in this process, which of course empties the old timetables. This is of course not what we want. Instead we should preserve the old 45 minutes timetables.
Is it just a matter of preventing Gibbon to delete the old periods or is it more complicated? I’m aware that this scenario is rather uncommon, isn’t it?
This is indeed an unusual and tough situation. Gibbon is designed to support different timetables in different school years, and for different year groups, but not two different timetables within one year. But, I do believe it is possible!
Say your timetable consists of 5 days: Mo, Tu, We, Th, Fr, each assigned to a range of dates throughout the year. What you’ll need to do is add 5 new days to the TT, such as MoNew, TuNew, We, New, ThNew, FrNew. These will be created with a different column (or columns) featuring the new period lengths. You then unassign the old days from dates in Term 3, and assign the new days to those days.
I believe this should work, but you’ll find the same import issue. So, before importing, backup the relevant database entries for the old TT, and then restore them after the import. Or, including old and new records in the same import.
Hope this helps…let’s see if this Gibbon is as flexible as its namesake!
I used your first suggestion. I had a recent backup and backed the old tt periods from gibbonTTDayRowClass and restored them.
I think it’s working just fine! Thanks!
Would it make sense to add a check box to the import form to optionally prevent the drop of old periods? Anyway, I guess this scenario is rather rare, right?
The main reason for not being able to update is lack of time. I tried to do so last year due to security issues but I faced compatibility problems on our server. In addition there are quite a number of hacks, which make an update a real pain. This year is probably out but hopefully I can update to a newer version in the course of next year.
Hacks can be tricky, especially if not fully documented. We try and avoid them, but understand that sometimes that is tough. Definitely worth upgrade when you can!