Creating a multi-term section

[Tom Hoffman]

On the course view form, next to the "New Section" button, instead of a drop-down to select a single term, there should be (above the button probably?) a list of terms in the year with check boxes, so you can create multiple *linked* sections across terms.

[Justas Sadzevičius (justas.sadzevicius)]

And it is a good opportunity to move replace the "New Section" button with SchoolTool action leading to a new add form.

[Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman)]

I don't want to change that at this point. For the novice user, having to give an id and/or title to a section is confusing, because they usually don't have either in mind for each section. For the more advanced user, I don't think it will take long to realize that you want to do this with an .xls import anyhow. Maybe we'll change it later, but I don't think it is a priority.

[Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman)]

Or perhaps I'm thinking of something different than you...

[Justas Sadzevičius (justas.sadzevicius)]

I added a new view, because it looks more consistent with the rest of SchoolTool and can be reused for both adding a section from term/sections and course. Also, it will be easier to add multi-course support, if we decide to add it to the interface.

I omitted the title field from the view, it is auto-generated, as before. It looks a bit weird and when adding many sections it becomes less obvious which section you just added. But it keeps the "simple" feel, and you can customize the title in "Edit" view anyway.

I still need to write some tests, then merge it to trunk.

[Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman)]

Once I understood the whole case, yes adding a new view is the right thing to do. Perhaps we should add the title field with the auto-generated name already there. The problem with it before was just looking at a blank field and suddenly confronting the notion that you need to think of a name for something that you hadn't thought about naming before.

[Justas Sadzevičius (justas.sadzevicius)]

It's not trivial to implement auto-generated name properly: course may be changed in the view, section can span multiple terms and in theory we may want to support sections of multiple courses. Maybe it even makes sense to add term's title to the section...

I left the field omitted for now, the changes are in trunk - if you have an idea how the auto-generation should work, please take a look at it and don't hesitate to file a bug.

Maybe we could keep the course field read-only if the "New Section" is clicked from a course's view. If "New Section" is clicked from term/sections, keep the title empty instead.

Another idea is to dynamically suggest titles as the user selects a course.

But all of this is out of scope for this bug in my opinion.

[Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman)]

OK, not trying to come up with a auto-generated title makes sense.