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Mark-session booking - instructions for staff

This facility lets students book time-slots for getting work marked. Most of the details are customisable. Mail your preferences to tl136 in the first instance - dates, times, capacity, who's eligible, etc.

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 title of the page
titlecontinuation - The continuation of the page title. Defaults to " lab marking"
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"
firstcolumntitle - the first column's heading. Defaults to "Date"
othercolumntitle - a list of the other column headings (the times of the sessions). Also allowed are eleven2one15 (11am-1pm, 15 min slots starting at 11.05), nine2eleven15 and nine2one15
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 variable needs to be set to days (the default)
otherwise firstcolumnmode needs to be set to words
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.
maxperuser - the maximum number of slots a user can book (default is 1) [added March 2009]
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. Defaults to "yes".
cancelledcells - a list of cell numbers showing which cells on the grid can't be used. Cells are numbered row-wise, 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.
printlabgroupmode - either nobreaks (the default) or breaks. This determines how the UIDS of people in a lab group will be displayed. In breaks mode there'll be one UID per line.

For example, the 2008 3F5 mark-up sessions used these options


   $picture="http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/tplcolor.gif";
   $contact_address="tl136";
   $private="yes";
   $title="3F5 lab marking in DPO";
   $students= array( 1 => "tpl", "mjf31", "nc229", "hs10000", "hrs", "rwp", "YEAR3");
   $firstcolumnentries =$WedFriMich2008;  
   $columntitles= $eleven2one15;
   $cancelledcells= array(1=>5,6,11,12);

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/bookingmarkupsessions/index.php?context=3F5Marking

Shorter URLs (e.g. http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/to/3F5marking) are available on request. Authentication is via Raven or CUED's PIN.

There's a similar facility for booking lab sessions

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