Understanding the Eighth models

Most of Ion’s apps either do not have models or only have very basic models. The eighth app, however, has a complicated system of models.

What follows is a brief list of the eighth models with a description of each. More information is available in comments of the source code.

• EighthSponsor: Represents a sponsor for an eighth period activity. Stores some information on the sponsor, including first/last name and department name. The user field that associates the EighthSponsor with a User is optional, but almost always set.

• EighthRoom: Represents a room in which an eighth period activity can be held. Stores the name, the capacity, and whether the room is available for use in eighth period activities. If the capacity is -1, that is considered to be infinite capacity.

• EighthActivity: Represents an eighth period activity. Note that this represents an activity, not a specific scheduling of the activity. In other words, only one of these exists for each club/team/special activity.

  In addition to the name and the description, this stores a lot of information about the activity that will be explained later.

• EighthBlock: Represents an eighth period block. Stores the date, the time to sign up by, the “letter” of the block, whether the block is locked, and some other miscellaneous information.

• EighthScheduledActivity: Represents a scheduling of an eighth period activity during a particular block. Has ForeignKeys to the the EighthBlock and the EighthActivity that it is associated with, and keeps track of whether it has been cancelled and whether it has had its attendance taken. As with EighthActivity, this will be explained in more detail later.

  The add_user() method of this class is where all of the logic to sign a user up for an activity is. Be very careful when modifying it.

• EighthSignup: Represents that a user is signed up for a particular EighthScheduledActivity during the block for which it is scheduled. Has ForeignKeys to the EighthScheduledActivity and the User objects. Also stores some information such as whether the user signed up after the deadline (assumed to be a pass), whether the user signed themselves up or was signed up by an eighth admin, the name and sponsor list of the activity they were signed up for previously (if applicable), whether they were absent, etc.

  Note: Since Ion’s launch, it has been plagued by duplicate EighthSignups (EighthSignups for the same user during the same block) being created. There are multiple checks before the object is saved to make sure it is unique, and uniqueness is enforced on a per-user, per- EighthScheduledActivity basis at the model level, but the problem has continued. As of summer 2019, measures have been enacted that will hopefully minimize the occurrences of this issue in the future, as well as allow better diagnosing of the problem if it occurs again.

• EighthWaitlist: Ion has all of the backend logic to implement waitlists for each activity, but it is not enabled in production (settings.ENABLE_WAITLIST is False). When the waitlist is enabled, an EighthWaitlist object represents that a user signed up for the waitlist for a particular EighthScheduledActivity at a particular time. The user’s position in the waitlist is calculated dynamically by finding the number of users who signed up for the waitlist before them.

• EighthActivitySimilarity: Keeps track of the similarity index of two activities, based on which users attend which activities. Used to recommend activities.

More details on EighthActivity and EighthScheduledActivity

There are a number of fields (the sponsor list, the room list, the activity capacity, whether the activity runs both blocks, whether it is restricted, etc.) that are usually the same for all schedulings of an EighthActivity, but sometimes change on a per-activity basis. Hence, both EighthActivity and EighthScheduledActivity have fields that record this information, and EighthScheduledActivity has helper methods that check both fields to determine the “real” value.

For BooleanFields, this is simple: if either of the EighthScheduledActivity’s field and the EighthActivity’s field is set to True, the activity is considered to have that property. For the room list and the sponsor list, the EighthScheduledActivity’s list is used if it has at least one room/sponsor; otherwise, the EighthActivity’s list is used.

In addition, the capacity has multiple overrides:

• If the EighthScheduledActivity has the capacity field set, it is used.

• If the EighthScheduledActivity has at least one room, the sum of all of their capacities is used.

• If the EighthActivity has the default_capacity field set, it is used.

• Finally, the sum of all of the capacities of the EighthActivity’s rooms is used.

Note that if the capacity is -1, it denotes unrestricted capacity. If the capacity calculation ends up using the sum of the capacities of a set of rooms and one of the room’s capacities is -1, the activity’s capacity will also be -1.