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How can I compare a course field to a section field in a filter/rule?
Rule Warning Appears, Disappears, and then Reappears
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How can I compare a course field to a section field in a filter/rule?
Overview | How to Do It | Troubleshooting
Overview
If you want to compare data across sections and courses in filters, you can accomplish this by first creating Reference Fields on the Section Template and assigning Reference Values, and then creating the filter.
How to Do It
Create the Reference Fields | Create the Filter | Use Case
Create the Reference Fields
Open the Section Template (Academic Scheduling > Settings > Templates).
Add a “Number” Custom Field field to the template. Learn how to add fields to the template here.
Give the field a name that distinguishes it as a reference field (e.g. Min Units - Reference Field).
In the Question Settings under “Set Reference Value”:
In the “Set source for reference value”, select “Course”.
For “Set reference value key”, enter the Question Id of the field from the Course Template in Curriculum. Learn more about that here.
Make the field read-only (i.e. Make sure “editable” isn’t checked).
Initially set the field to only be visible for Super Admins (i.e. Make sure “visible” is checked and then select “Super Admin” from the dropdown). This will help you in testing/validating your custom rule. Once you know it’s working, set this field to be not visible for anyone (i.e. Make sure “visible” is not checked).
Repeat the above steps for other fields (in the below example, we have a field for the min units and one for max units).
Create the Filter
Now that you have Reference Fields on the Section Template, you can create filters that compare the section’s credits to the course’s credits, as shown below.
Learn more about creating Custom Section Rules here.
Use Case
The pre-built Credit Range Conflict rule does not check against variable credits, so if your institution uses variable credits (i.e. You have distinct minimum credit and maximum credit values), you will need to create a custom rule.
The filter you create would look for the following criteria:
Section min credits must be less than or equal to the section max credits (obvious, but good to enforce).
Section min credits must be greater than or equal to the course min credits.
Section min credits must be less than the course max credits.
Section max credits must be less than or equal to the course max credits.
Section max credits must be greater than the course min credits.
In order to create this filter, you will need to create Reference Fields on the section template to essentially “copy” the course’s credit values to the section so that you can use a Field Select comparison in the filter.
Troubleshooting
Rule Warning Appears, Disappears, and then Reappears
Problem Overview
A section isn’t in violation of a rule but there is a warning indicating a violation before you open the section. Once you open the section, the warning disappears. But once you close the section, the warning appears again.
Explanation
This can happen if you have an action associated with one of the fields, and the section would be in violation of a rule were it not for that action.
Actions fire ONLY when the form is rendered, so whenever someone opens the section, the actions get triggered and that turns off the conflict warning.