Oct 25, 2017

Can you spot a child struggling to swim? An EQ primary school is organising swimming lessons for term 4, and as a precaution the school is asking parents to volunteer as spotters – to spot the kids that are struggling and perhaps sinking while the swim teacher is distracted. It’s an important role.

The process of organising these volunteers is complicated. Parents are often happy to volunteer, but they only want to attend when their own child is having a lesson. Each class will have just one lesson per week. And for the most part a parent only volunteers once per term.

Our volunteer booking will handle this, however it will take a while to setup as roles will need to be defined for each class. To do this for a single week is possibly, however configuring this each week of term 4 is arduous.

Duplicating Rounds
So the answer is to implement a function to duplicate an interview round. There is a just a single screen that prompts for the new start date, and we encourage the use of the same relative day of the week, although it is not essential.

We made the duplication function generic, so it will work for all interview rounds, duplicating all of the configuration information but not the actual booking data. To be clear we duplicate the following details:

• The interview round dates and settings
• The time slots (adjusted to fit the new round)
• Where parents meet pre-selected staff we apply the same list of pre-selected staff
• Where roles are defined we duplicate the roles
• Where staff / roles have unavailability we duplicate that unavailability
• The same round managers are attached to the new round
• Shared teaching is duplicated to the new round

Considerations
To duplicate an interview round all we ask for is the start date – everything is adjusted relative to this date. Let’s consider for example an interview round that runs from the 1-10-2017 to the 3-10-2017. If this is duplicated and we choose 8-10-2017 as the new start date then the adjustments would include:

• We start by calculating the days different, in this case it is 7 days
• The end date is adjust by 7 days to be set at 10-10-2017
• The time slots are all adjusted by 7 days, so they will now map into the new date range
• The unavailability is adjusted with the time slots

If your interview round runs from Monday – Wednesday, and you select a new start day which is a Thursday, the new interview round will run from Thursday – Saturday. In general duplication expects your new start date to reflect a similar week day to the original round, if it started on a Monday the new round should also start on a Monday. However, we don’t enforce this.

If pre-selected staff, or staff unavailability is involved in the round you are duplicating, then you should be aware that we aren’t making any checks in regard to whether the staff member is current. You may find some missing links in these pre-selected staff or shared teaching etc, however in general these should automatically resolve.