Planning domains

A planning domain gives an administrator a perimeter — the data they manage — and rights — the actions they can carry out on it. On an account that gathers several campuses, programs or institutions into a single timetable, each planner works on their own share, without getting lost in the whole or touching anyone else's.

An administrator can be given one or several domains. As long as they have none, they keep full access to the account: domains constrain the accounts you want to constrain; the others stay unchanged.

Domain or custom role?

Custom roles and domains answer two different questions, and they combine:

• a custom role decides which operations an administrator carries out — which modules, for viewing, editing or deleting;
• a domain decides which data they act on — which classes, which sites, which classrooms, which subjects, which timetables.

A custom role does not tell one class from another; a domain does. You can give both to the same person: the role limits their operations, the domain limits their territory. Domains are enabled on Premium accounts, with the same option as custom roles.

Open the domains screen

Domains are managed from the administrator list. In Administration, open Users, the administrators tab, then Domains.

Only an unrestricted administrator — one with no domain — opens this screen and assigns domains. Managing the administrator accounts themselves stays their responsibility: a planner constrained by a domain neither creates nor edits an administrator account.

The perimeter: which data

The perimeter is defined in the Filter section. It is organized into dimensions, from the broadest to the finest:

• Campus and Subjects filter across the board: they apply to everything the planner touches, whatever the timetable;
• the timetable, and below it the sites (and their classrooms) and the classes (and their groups), follow the structure of a timetable.

A dimension left on All imposes no constraint. To narrow it, pick a criterion and a value:

• Equals — the exact value (a site, a grade…);
• Starts with — a prefix, handy when your subject or class codes carry the department or the program (CS-, BUS-…);
• Contains — a value present in the label.

Numeric criteria, such as a classroom's capacity, replace those variants with ≥ and ≤ thresholds — enough to hand the lecture halls to a dedicated planner, or to keep them out of a domain.

Every criterion flips to Exclude, to remove rather than include. A + button adds an alternative (“or”) within the same dimension — several sites, several grades — and the dimensions combine: a lesson enters the perimeter when it satisfies all the constrained dimensions.

Each dimension offers the criteria that fit it:

At the top of the filter, the eye opens an Overview: Overview gives the number of entities covered and a sample, so you can check the perimeter before saving. Every row has one of its own, so you can inspect a single dimension in isolation.

The rights: which actions

The Rights section offers two ways of applying the perimeter:

• Restrict — “Only the data inside the filter stays editable, with the rights ticked below.” The planner views everything, but edits only their perimeter, and only within the rights granted.
• Hide — “The filter only presets the display: all rights remain granted.” The perimeter declutters the display without taking anything away: useful for focusing on your own campus while keeping control of the whole.

In Restrict mode, a matrix spells out the rights. The principle is subtractive, as it is for custom roles: everything is granted by default; you untick what the domain forbids.

Two tables read across Modification, Creation and Deletion:

• the entities: Timetable settings (modification only), Classes, Teachers, Classrooms, Subjects and Sites;
• the Lessons: their creation, modification and deletion, then, for fine-grained editing, a lesson's positions on the grid, its teacher, classroom, modality, videoconference link, status, duration and comment. The classroom, the modality and the videoconference link share a single window but remain three distinct rights: handing over the choice between on-site and remote does not open up classroom assignment.

Reading, for its part, always stays open: a domain limits what is written, never what is seen.

What the planner sees

The planner sees the whole timetable — that is what lets them spot a conflict between their perimeter and a colleague's — but the lists of classes, classrooms or subjects show only their own entities. Wherever items are filtered out, a marker labelled Hidden by your domains says so and, in one click, details what is hidden and by which domain. That is the direct answer to “I can't see that classroom”: the information is on screen.

If an action falls outside the perimeter, Omniscol refuses it and explains why: the display filtering is backed by a check on every save.

On the lessons screen

A control that a right forbids stays visible but inactive, never hidden away: the planner sees that the function exists, and knows where they stand. This holds everywhere a lesson is edited — on the grid, in a lesson's record and in the table view.

The Actions menu follows the same rule, action by action: removing classrooms in bulk depends on the classroom right, automatic allocation on the creation right, and the delete all lessons action on the deletion right. A mass action also applies only to the lessons in the perimeter: a selection that goes beyond it is trimmed, not refused outright, and the planner is told so.

Generate a timetable

Generation calls for its own right: many delegated planners manage their lessons without ever launching a generation. When it is granted, the scope of the computation is confined to the perimeter — the planner can narrow it further, never widen it. That is what makes the result applicable: otherwise a generation that moved a lesson outside the perimeter would be refused on save, and all the work would be lost.

The generation settings are an exception to one rule: they are saved with the right to generate, even without the right on the timetable settings.

Import a lesson table

The columns the planner has no right to edit appear read-only: the planner reads the data but does not change it.

The class, the subject and the group are an exception, because they are not plain fields: emptying one of them deletes the lesson, and changing it moves the lesson elsewhere. Those three columns therefore open only with the creation, modification and deletion rights together.

If a row falls outside the perimeter, the whole import is refused and the rows at fault are pointed out. Omniscol never sends anything other than what was entered: an explicit refusal is better than a silently truncated import.

Assign a domain

A domain is assigned from an administrator's record, like a role. You can assign several: the planner then combines the perimeters, each with its own rights. Domains add up without merging — an action is allowed as soon as one domain covers it.

Creating, duplicating or deleting a domain happens on the same screen: Add adds a domain, Save saves.