How-to
Seeing what other faculties have booked
A lecturer who teaches at two faculties, a hall three of them share. Each faculty keeps its own timetable, and Wise Timetable shows each one what the others have already taken — so the same hour is not given out twice.
Separate timetables that can see each other
Many universities timetable faculty by faculty, each in its own database, with its own staff and its own teaching hours. That works until two of them share something: a lecturer who teaches statistics at two faculties, or the one large hall on campus.
Wise Timetable can show each faculty what the others have already taken of the lecturers and rooms they share. Nothing is merged and nothing is copied into anybody's data: each timetable stays its own, and what it shows of the others is read from their databases as they publish.
It is one of the ways separate timetables are joined; connecting the members of one university describes the others.
What comes across
- Their lessons and their bookings, for every lecturer and every room you share, in every week.
- As bookings in a colour of their own, labelled EXT, the other faculty's database and the names concerned — the lecturer, or the rooms taken at that hour.
- Counted like any other booking. The generator will not put your lesson on that lecturer or in that room at those hours, and when you place a lesson by hand the lecturer or the room shows as taken.
- Never part of your timetable. They are not saved into it and not published from it, so they never appear on your web pages or in anybody's calendar as yours.
- Left out on their side: bookings they have set not to be shown on the web, or to be ignored when overlaps are checked.
Setting it up
On Settings › Miscellaneous › General. The settings are saved with the timetable, so everyone who opens it sees the same faculties.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Sync/View external timetable reservations | Tick it to switch the whole thing on. |
| External timetable database name(s) | The other faculties' timetable databases, separated by a slash: faculty_a/faculty_b. Letters, digits and the underscore only. |
| Filter sync by lecturer(s) | Optional. Only these lecturers, separated by semicolons and written the way your timetable writes names. Empty means everyone you share. |
| Filter sync by room(s) | Optional. Only these rooms, separated by semicolons — not slashes, because room names such as C-101/A contain them. Empty means every room you share. |
| Source DB name (optional) | Leave it empty unless we have set it up with you. |
Where the databases have to be
The other faculties' databases have to be on the same database server as yours, and your timetable's database account has to be allowed to read them: the comparison is made in one query across the databases, on that server. A faculty on a different server cannot be shown this way.
That makes it something we set up with your IT department rather than a tick an office sets on its own — and it is the first thing to settle.
How names are matched
A lecturer is recognised by first name and last name, as both timetables hold them; a room by its name. There is no guessing: an initial in place of a first name, or a room written with a hyphen in one timetable and without it in the other, is no match — and that lecturer or room simply shows nothing from the other faculty.
So agree the names of the people and rooms you share, and keep them the same in both timetables. The other synchronisation between faculties, described on connecting the members of one university, reads names through a dictionary; this view does not.
When it refreshes
When a timetable is opened, the other faculties are read straight away, with a short message while it happens, and after that the desktop looks again about once a minute. A faculty is read again only when it has published since the last look, so a neighbour that has not changed costs nothing.
What you see is therefore what the other faculty has published. Changes they have made and not yet published reach you when they publish.
If a database cannot be reached, the desktop says so once and names it, rather than showing an empty week that would read as nothing booked over there.
Related
- Connecting the members of one universitySeparate timetables that stay separate, and see each other where they have to.
- Marking bookings, and clearing them outMark the bookings that belong together and delete them in one go, and let one-off bookings remove themselves.
- Several planners working on the same timetable at the same timeA different question: several people inside one timetable, rather than several timetables.
- Master rooms, and changing a lesson's roomA clinic and its consulting rooms, a hall with a movable wall: book the whole and every part is taken.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.