What is Field relations?

Field relations allows you to connect two fields between objects in a logical manner to achieve a valuable end result. As an example, valuable connections might be: “Number of planned students” field in the student group object needs to be smaller than the “Number of seats” field in a room object or Teacher object that is marked with “Wheelchair accessibility” need needs to only be scheduled in a room that is marked as an “Accessible” room. This can be combined with other dependencies: If you are booking a room for a Lecture, the field relations are between the normal seating capacity of the room and the planned number of students. If you are booking for an event and have a different seating capacity for events, the field relations would be between the planned number of students and the event seating capacity.

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What value does this bring?

Field relations allows you to build more granular and robust rules for relationships between objects based on different scenarios and situations, meaning that you save significant time finding the right objects to connect as well as getting a better user experience. When used for rooming, it will greatly speed up the process of allocating the right room for the right situation considering all dependencies for room allocation + ensure better room utilisation because the rooms allocated would always be the best match given the situation.

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Beatrijs Vermaere, implementation project team member at Ghent University:

“Before the implementation of field relations, it took several steps to first determine the required room capacity and set-up for a class or exam activity, and then locate a suitable and available room meeting these requirements. The field relations in TimeEdit Core combine these steps in one move. This helps our schedulers to quickly book a room without having to go through the room catalogue and look up the estimated number of students. The field relations are in other words time saving and very handy for us.”

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