Configuring a custom Seat Assignment procedure

Owned by Seth Petry-Johnson
Oct 21, 2022
2 min read

This document covers an advanced use case for Offerings.

See also Activity Offerings for a high level overview.

Overview

This feature is designed for complex, self-hosted exam scenarios and it requires the use of a custom SQL procedure to implement the seat assignment logic.

This features does NOT apply to implementations that directly expose the Seat Assignment attribute to the applicant or attendee to choose a specific Offering.

If an organization is hosting their own exams then they may have complex business rules governing who can attend which exam sittings.

For instance, the organization might ask all attendees to indicate their desired sittings, and then assign them to actual Offerings at a later date. This allows the organization to maximize their efficiency by cancelling potential sittings that failed to garner enough interest, diverting those attendees to other sittings instead.

The “Reassign” button on the Manage Offerings page will clear out all Seat Assignments for the Activity and will re-assign all pending Seat Assignments using the SQL procedure configured on the Activity Type.

Configuration overview

To configure this sort of approach:

1

Make the Seat Assignment attribute hidden to the Practitioner

The whole point of this approach is that the Seat Assignments will be made using a custom script, rather than directly selected.

2

Collect preferences from attendees using Extrinsic attributes

Use custom Attributes to collect information necessary to make the seat assignments. For instance, you might ask attendees to indicate their top 3 locations in priority order.

3

Create a custom SQL procedure that updates the Seat Assignment attributes

Create a custom SQL procedure that implements the business logic for determining which attendees should be assigned to which Offerings, and then update the Seat Assignment attributes to reflect those assignments.

This will require technical assistance from the Engineering Support team and is considered a client-specific customization.

4

Configure the Activity Type to use the custom procedure

Modify the Activity Type’s Offerings configuration and select the newly created Seat Assignment assignment procedure.