Seat Assignment Attribute
Conceptually, an Activity Offering indicates that a given Activity Definition is "offered" on a specific date/time, at a specific location, and has a specific number of "seats" that are available.
Seat Assignment attributes represent that one or more of those "seats" was assigned to a specific person.
Overview
Seat Assignments are central to the Activity Offering feature.
Offerings often represent exam sittings, in which case a Seat Assignment represent that one of the available “seats” in that exam is requested by or assigned to a specific person.
The typical configuration is:
An Activity Definition represents the exam itself
Specific Offerings represent the specific dates/times/locations of the exam sittings
An Activity Instance represents a candidate’s request to take the exam
A Seat Assignment Attribute on the Complete Activity Workflow allows the candidate to choose a specific sitting (Offering) they wish to attend
Seat Assignments are not supported on stand-alone Activity Instances (i.e. Activity Instances that are not associated with a Learning Plan Instance).
The system does not prevent you from adding a Seat Assignment to a Complete Activity Workflow that will be used for stand-alone Activity Instances, but such a configuration will not work correctly.
Configuration
Setting | Purpose |
|---|---|
Search Experience | Seat Assignments can present two different user interfaces. See the Input Mode section, below, for details. |
Elastic Search Configuration | (Only applies to the “Search Popup” experience) Choose the Elastic Search configuration that controls the search popup. |
Restrict to Offerings of Activities matching this filter | (Only applies to the “Cascading Dropdowns” experience) Choose an https://heuristicsolutions.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOCS/pages/581468324 that defines which Activities are selectable. |
Restrict by Offering Type | (Only applies to the “Cascading Dropdowns” experience) Optional; if entered, then only Offerings with a Type matching this value will be offered as options. See the “Input Mode” section below for more details. |
Default capacity to reserve | Each Offering has a set amount of “capacity”, such as the number of available seats. This value indicates the default number of capacity units to reserve for this Seat Assignment. This just sets the default; the value can be changed on a per-Seat Assignment basis. Seat Capacity is allowed to be “0”. This might apply, for example, if the candidate is being tested in a private room and therefore does not take up a “seat” in the main exam area. The system does not automatically prevent over-allocation, which occurs when the sum of all Seat Assignment capacities exceeds the total capacity of the Offering. Over-allocated Offerings are identified on the https://heuristicsolutions.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOCS/pages/3346300929 |
Default status | If you want to implement some sort of review or approval queue, then choose “Pending” as the default status. Otherwise, choose “Confirmed”. |
When editable, restrict editing of status to | When this Attribute is editable, then all aspects of the Seat Assignment can be changed:
To allow candidates to change the selected Offering, but prevent them from changing the status or capacity, select an administrative Role here. When the Seat Assignment is editable, but the user doesn’t have one of the Roles identified here, they can de-select the Offering but cannot change any other properties of it. |
Custom list with available Accommodations | Selecting a Custom List will display its options as accommodations that the candidate can request. See the “Input mode” section, below, for details. |
Input mode
Seat Assignments can display one of two different user interfaces:
A set of cascading drop-downs, where the user first picks an Activity, then a Provider, then a specific Offering
A visual search interface
Search Popup
When the list of available Offerings will be large, the Search Popup interface provides a superior user experience by allowing the user to search and filter the set of options.
System Administrators can view this page for Elastic Search configuration instructions
Cascading Drop Downs
When the list of available Offerings is small, and the user does not need much information to make a decision, then a list of cascading dropdowns offers a very simple user experience. Once an Offering is selected, if the user has the ability to manage the status, they also see a form for updating the seat number, status, etc.
Filtering by "Offering Type"
This applies to the “Cascading Drop-Downs” search experience only.
If an "Offering Type" is specified in the configuration, only Offerings with a type containing the entered string are selectable.
This supports complex use cases in which an Exam Administration consists of multiple "parts", such as a computer-based test AND a practical test. There would be a Seat Assignment for each "part", and each would be filtered so that only the relevant offerings are selectable for that seat assignment.
Special Accommodations
If a list of available Accommodations is configured then the user will see an option to request specific accommodations on their Seat Assignment.
A reviewer or administrator can set the status of individual accommodations to “pending”, “approved”, or “denied”.
Display / readonly mode
In display mode, a Seat Assignment displays a readonly summary of the selected Offering.
Data Storage
This attribute stores the id of a row in the SEAT_ASSIGNMENT table which tracks the linked Offering, the used capacity, etc.