Preparing Course Data for Schedule Viewing

A simple tabular input like any of the plain text files of Sample 1 is a suitable format for the course data. The order of the lines in the input is irrelevant, except that the first line contains column headings. (Here is the course data input used for Sample 1.) With just a few restrictions, you may use whatever column headings you wish in whatever order you wish. (Note that files in formats such as .doc and .xls cannot be submitted directly, but it should be easy for you to convert them to plain text.) Following is guidance on preparing the input file containing the course data:

• Columns are separated by any string of space and/or tab characters. This rule leads to the following two subrules:
  • Except that totally blank lines are allowed, every row should contain an entry in every column. If the column is not meaningful for some row, one should nonetheless enter something such as X, n/a, or tba.
  • No table entry can contain a blank or tab; instead one can use such characters as - and _.
• For now, the implementation requires that the following column headings are present; the names are case-sensitive.
  • Code: A unique identifier for the row in the table; if you don't already have a need for such codes, you could probably just put your course and section number together to provide this unique code. Alternatively, you could just number the rows sequentially. In any case, this code should not include any of the characters that appear in the Days column if you want to use "Links" (described below).
  • Days: The meeting days for the course. The current implementation requires that this be a string containing one or more of the characters "UMTWRFA" (or it can be "X" or "tba" or such, but don't use "TBA", since that appears to include the actual day Tuesday).
  • Beg: Beginning time of the course in 24 hour (military) format (four digits and nothing else).
  • End: End time of the course in 24 hour (military) format (four digits and nothing else).
• Optional column headings that appear in Sample 1 are the following:
  • Num: Course number.
  • Sec: Section number.
  • Type: Type of course, e.g., "Lab", "Lec", etc.
  • Cred: Credits (could be a range or single number).
  • Loc: Location.
  • Lim: Enrollment limit.
  • Instr: Instructor.
  • Title: Title.
  • Link: This field is used to indicate that a particular row is linked to another. For example, one may have specific lab sections linked to specific lecture sections, such that when a student registers for a particular lecture section, he is automatically enrolled in the associated lab section. The default for plots is that gray arrows are drawn to show links from a particular section on the plot to other sections. (A single link entry may generate multiple arrows. For example a Monday lab linked to a MWF lecture will have arrows from the lab to the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday plots for the lecture.)
• You can use whatever other column headings you would like, but to avoid the possibility of conflict with variable names used in the implementation of the software that processes the schedule, you should not use any names that end in an upper-case letter and have the other letters in lower case. For example, don't use daY.