Blocked Lessons

[Catherine Holsgrove]

Our timetable works on 35min periods with most timetabled as 1hr 10min doubles. If I have 5 periods a week for a subject and want two doubles and one single how can I do this?

Many thanks,

Catherine

[admin]

There are a few possibilities:
1. The simplest one but imperfect:
Set for the subject:
a) the option "Blocked if several a day" in "Blocking mode"
and
b) "Max number of lessons a day" to 2
If the number of lessons is equal to allowed days in week for this subject but one we will get one unblocked lesson & two 2-hours blocks. In this case 3 days of week should be allowed for the subject for the solution to be working.

But better is to use following alternatives:

2. If it is reasonable to decide a priori about arrangement of the subject among days of week:
a) define in "Groups of days", one group for each day of week (5 groups: Monday, Tuesday, etc ...)
b) define "Max number of lessons a day" equal to 2, 1 or 0 in each "Groups of days" for the subject
c) set the option "Blocked if several a day" in "Blocking mode". This lets to get lessons to be blocked.

3. The best solution but maybe a bit artificial:
(We will get exactly what we mean without additional assumptions.)
a) split the subject into two subjects, define one unblocked e.g. "MySubject" with "Number of lessons per week" set to 1 and "Demanded the smallest number of periods for one unit" set to 1
and second one e.g. "MySubject-blocked" with "Number of lessons per week" set to 4 and "Demanded the smallest number of periods for one unit" set to 2
b) set "Max number of lessons a day" to 2 for "MySubject-blocked" to prevent 4 hours in one day if necessary
c) to prevent "MySubject-blocked" & "MySubject" to take part together in the same day you can define "Group of subject" with both of them and set "Number of lessons per week" for this group to 2.