Migrating from aSc Timetables

aSc Timetables (Slovakia) is a long-established and very widespread timetable generation program, notably in international schools and several Central European countries. Good news: Omniscol reads and writes the native aSc Timetables file directly, with no intermediate spreadsheet and no manual remapping of structures.

One file, both ways

aSc Timetables saves a timetable in an XML file ("aSc Timetables 2012" format). Omniscol can:

• read this file to rebuild a complete timetable (classes, groups, teachers, subjects, rooms, courses);
• write back a file of the same type from an Omniscol timetable, to reopen it in aSc or Edupage (the school-life solution from the same publisher).

Everything happens from the Import and export screen, with no technical manipulation: to export, the Export data in aSc (.xml) format button; to import, you simply select the XML file produced by aSc. The round trip is reversible: exporting then re-importing yields the same structure on the Omniscol side, apart from naming conventions.

What carries over

Picked up automatically when reading the file:

• Classes and their groups (including divisions for lab work).
• Subjects with their codes.
• Rooms with their capacity.
• Teachers (last name, first name, contact details).
• Courses (subject, volume, teacher) and their placed lessons (day, time slot, room).
• Breaks and pauses during the day.
• Alternating weeks (A/B) if they are configured in aSc.

What needs a look after import

• Complex constraints specific to aSc (sequence constraints, conditional rooms, very specific anti-chaining): Omniscol converts them as well as it can, but some rules are expressed differently and deserve a review. Conditional rooms are better covered by Classroom specialisations; the others by Teacher availability and Time constraints (general system).
• Courses shared by several classes (one subject common to several classes): converted into Groups of groups. Check that the result matches your intention.
• Renaming and round trips: Omniscol does not keep aSc's internal identifiers; when it writes an aSc file back, it rebuilds the correspondences from the entities, in particular from their name. In practice, if you plan to re-export to aSc, avoid renaming classes, teachers and subjects in the meantime, otherwise the correspondences drift.

Continuing to feed aSc in parallel

If you keep aSc for the duration of a transition, the reverse export lets you keep feeding it from Omniscol — useful, for example, when partner institutions still consult aSc. The generated file reopens in aSc Desktop (2012 version or later).

What needs attention

• Accented characters: if some accents come out wrong after a round trip, it is a file-encoding matter. The Omniscol export uses the encoding expected by aSc Desktop by default; simply check that an accented name survives the round trip.
• Different generation engines: aSc and Omniscol do not have the same solver profile. A timetable that generated easily in aSc may need a few adjustments in Omniscol, and vice versa.
• aSc versions: the import targets the 2012 format. Older versions may not be directly compatible — in that case, save in the 2012 format from aSc Desktop first.