Department of Engineering

Lab bookings - instructions for staff

This facility lets students book lab sessions. Most of the details are customisable. Mail your preferences to tl136 - dates, times, who's eligible, etc, or try the draft Set-up page.

The instructions below are mostly for the maintainer's benefit, though teaching staff might like to see what's on offer (see the example configuration). The options are

• expirydate - The page will not display after the supplied date (in ISO 8601 format). Default is "2020-12-31" [added May 2011]
• title - The first part of the page title
• titlecontinuation - The continuation of the page title. Defaults to " lab booking"
• picture - the URL of an image that will appear on the top-left of the screen. Defaults to ""
• extratext - HTML code that will appear just above the table. Defaults to ""
• contact_address - the hermes address that users can contact if they have queries
• managers - an array of uids of the people who can blank out slots and cancel previous bookings. Defaults to "tpl"
• max_num_in_each_group - the number of columns
• firstcolumntitle - the first column's heading. Defaults to "Date"
• othercolumntitle - the unchanging part of the other columns' headings - the column number is appended to it.
• firstcolumnentries - a list of entries for the first column. These can be arbitrary strings or dates of the sessions. If they're dates, then
  • the list needs to be of the form

       array("2008-2-13", "2008-4-3", "W,F");  
    

    where the first element and second element are the first and last days of the period, and the third element is a comma-separated list of abbreviations for days, the choice being Su, M, T, W, Th, F, S. Alternatively, there are some abbreviations available for some common date-lists: WedFriMich2008, WedMich2008, FriMich2008, WedFriLent2009, WedLent2009, FriLent2009, etc
  • The firstcolumnmode needs to be set to days
  otherwise firstcolumnmode needs to be set to words (the default)
• deadlineday - this only has an effect when firstcolumnmode is set to days. It can be never (the default) or an integer. The integer (in units of days) determines on which day (relative to the date of the slot) the entry will become read-only. A value of 0 means that the deadline is midnight at the end of the date of the slot.
• students - a list of who's allowed to fill in entries. As special cases, YEAR1, YEAR2, YEAR3 and YEAR4 are accepted as list items.
• private - Controls who can see the page. It can be set to yes or no. If no, then all CUED people can see the page, otherwise only the students can.
• cancelledcells - a list of cell numbers showing which cells on the grid can't be used. Cells are numbered row by row, starting from 1. Defaults to an empty array.
• mode - either user (the default), 1Alabgroup or 1Blabgroup . If 1Alabgroup or 1Blabgroup the slots are booked by the labgroup of the user rather than by the individual's UID.

For example, the 2008 3F5 lab (max 4 students per session) used these options, the dates set-up using a pre-set variable

   $picture="http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/tplcolor.gif";
   $contact_address="tl136";
   $private="yes";
   $max_num_in_each_group=4;
   $title="3F5 lab in DPO";
   $students= array( 1 => "tpl", "mjf31", "nc229", "hs10000", "hrs","rwp","rwp12","YEAR3");
   $firstcolumnentries =$WedFriMich2008;
   $othercolumntitle="student";

Here's another example. In this case, a class of 20 students needed to organise themselves into pairs

   $title="Aircraft Wing Analysis";
   $titlecontinuation=" group selection";
   $firstcolumntitle="Group";
   $firstcolumnmode="words";
   $expirydate="2012-06-01";
   $private="yes";
   $max_num_in_each_group=2;
   $firstcolumnentries =array( 1 =>"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10","11","12","13","14","15","16","17","18","19","20");
   $students= array( 1 => "tpl", "wrg", [...]);
   $contact_address="tl136";

Each page also has a unique keyword that will form part of the URL. For example, the 3F5 lab has this URL

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/teaching/apps/bookinglabsessions/index.php?context=3F5

Shorter URLs (e.g. http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/to/3F5labs) are available on request. Authentication is via Raven or CUED's PIN.

There's a similar facility for booking mark sessions.