Jan 23, 2018

Many of the Sobs applications work better when you configure your school calendar information.  The following should help you setup the calendar for your school.

Creating years, terms and holidays

Click on the ‘Calendar’ link in the Configuration menu.  This will take you to a page showing the current and any future calendars.  Historical years will automatically disappear, however they do still exist in the system for historical purposes.

If the current year doesn’t exist there are instances when this will be automatically created for you.  If you need to create a new year record use the ‘Add year’ link in the top right of the table display.  With this record you will define the year, the days of the week that are considered to be school days.  If you are using the Room and Resource Booking application there is an additional option to hide weekends from the booking displays.

On the Year record just added you will find a link ‘Add term’ to add a term to this year.  Click this link to define the term dates, and the starting week and day number.  The term dates are entered in a dd/mm/yyyy format.

Terms are automatically numbered from 1 after being sorted into starting date order.  So if you are only wanting to enter term 4 it will appear in this calendar as term 1.  That isn’t a big problem, the system will still happily work with this term.  The only place this might appear incorrect is when using the School Calendar application – when you print the calendar for a term it will put the term number in the report title.

On the term records just added you will find a link ‘Add holiday’ to define holidays that occur during this term.  You can enter the date of the holiday and a description.  If you are using the Room and Resource Booking application you can also define whether all booking should be blocked on this day.

Setting up timetable periods and plans

For those schools using the Room and Resource Booking application you will want to configure timetables for your period structure.  You do this under the ‘Periods’ link when logged into that application.  There should be another help article for that topic, however at the time of writing there wasn’t, but maybe at the time of reading there will be.

Publishing the calendar

So far we have simply entered a number of dates that define our school year.  Now we need to apply our Week numbers, Day numbers and timetable plans to these dates.

Start by clicking on the ‘Calendar’ link in the Configuration menu.  This should show a list of terms for the current year.  Towards the right hand end of the term display there are columns for ‘Preview’, ‘Calendar’, and ‘View’.

Click the radio button in the ‘Preview’ column to preview what the calendar would look like if it were published now.  (The calendar will appear at the bottom of the page – it will have a green tinge indicating it is a preview and not a published calendar).  At this stage you should be checking that the correct Week numbers appear in the left hand column and that the correct Day numbers are applied to each date.  (Some applications don’t require Day numbers, these are optional).

Click the radio button in the ‘View’ column to view what the currently published calendar.

In the ‘Calendar’ column there will be a link, however the function of the link will change depending on the status of the term.  If the term has not been published previously then the link will say ‘Publish’.  If the term has been previously published the link will say ‘Update’.  If the term was previously published and some aspect of the term has been updated it will likely say ‘Needs updating’.

For your initial entry of a term you should click the radio button in the ‘Preview’ column, check the Week and Day numbers are correct, if not edit the term to change these, and then preview the calendar again.  Once the Week and Day numbers are correct you can then click the ‘Publish’ link to publish your calendar.  This action simply locks in those settings you have been adjusting.

If you later decide to change the term dates, Week or Day numbering, then you will need to ‘Update’ the published calendar with these changes.

After publishing the calendar you can click the radio button in the ‘View’ column to display the currently published calendar.

Adjusting details for a particular date

If you need to adjust details for individual dates, for example where you want to switch Day 6 and Day 2 for a particular date, click the radio button in the ‘View’ column to display the currently published calendar.

Each date will appear as a button.  Click the date to be changed.  You will have the option to adjust the timetable plan and the Day number.  These changes will be saved in the currently published plan.

If you ‘Update’ this currently published plan these adjustments will be overwritten.