Generating Schedule Variations

Walkthrough

On the Stage Card, begin by clicking on the button labelled "1 Variation", which will open up a dropdown allowing you to choose between 1 to 5 variants to be generated. Once you have decided on the number of Schedule Variations you would like, click the Draft Schedule(s) button.

A closed stage, ready for schedules to be drafted

This will create a background job that will be scheduled to run shortly, that will generate the variations using the Lottery module's processing algorithm. After the processing algorithm completes, you will have one or more Schedule Variations. These can be reviewed in the Variations Overview one at a time.

The Select Schedule Variation dropdown

Under the "Reviewing Schedules" heading in the Variations Overview, you'll see a dropdown selector labelled Select Schedule Variation allowing you to select one of the generated variations for review. The dropdown will contain up to five numbered variations, depending on the number specified when clicking the Draft Schedule(s) button beforehand. If any errors occurred while drafting a specific schedule variation, that variation will be marked with a red "Failed" badge, both in the dropdown and when that variation is selected.

Reviewing a Schedule Variation

When a schedule variation is selected, a modified version of a rotation scheduler will appear below the dropdown selector. This scheduler interface contains a stacked list of Learner rows, with some meta information in the left-hand column, such as their profile picture, full name, and student number.

Each Learner row will have one of three Learner Assignment Messages. For a successful Schedule Variation, there should be no Learners with a red failure message. In each variation, a Learner who has been successfully assigned an Option will have either an "Auto-Assigned" message (for Learners who did not submit their Rankings), or a "Assigned Rank #XX" message. The "Assigned Rank #XX" message indicates that the Option that the Learner received was ranked at the XX number in their list of submitted Rankings.

Merging a Schedule Variation

Once everything in a specific Schedule Variation has been reviewed, if it is deemed to be ready and chosen as the most viable variation out of all that were drafted, it should be merged into the Lottery's working schedule.

This process is initiated with the button under the scheduler, labelled Merge Schedule. When clicked, it will open a confirmation dialogue to ensure that it is not merged before the administrator is ready. Upon clicking the Confirm button in the confirmation modal, the currently selected Schedule Variation will be merged into the Lottery's working schedule.

If an error happens to occur when attempting to merge the variation into the Lottery's working schedule, an alert message will be displayed to inform the administrator that the operation was not successful. The HTTP response code from the API request will be included in this alert, which can be helpful for diagnosing any potential issues.

When the process of merging the variation has completed, you will be returned to the Stages Overview, where the Stage Card's status will be updated to "Merged". Once you have completed any desired merge actions, you are ready to begin the final step of the Lottery process, which is to publish the Lottery's working schedule.