Determining if courses are available next semester

[johnwhelchel]

Hey guys,

So I was thinking it might make sense to add a boolean field to coursenum for 'available next semetser' that is redone whenever a course/coursenum is changed (i.e. new semesters added) it would save a lot of calculations, and make rankings smarter. I made the decision to just pull the first 1000 for rankings and go from there, which makes it much faster. But if we could exclude classes not being taught next semester, twould be good.

Thoughts?

[superteam333]

Yeah I'm fine with adding that, but idk if we should necessarily exclude them from the rankings (though I think this should be an option for them to select). In order to make the rankings page faster John I think you need to keep pulling the data as you need it. Instead of loading 10000 courses all at once, start with say 100. Then keep making ajax requests to load more. I would imagine this could either be done whenever the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, or it may be possible to make it continuously fetch in chunks to potentially avoid making the user ever wait. Think about the way facebook news feed probably works. That being said, I'm sure this would get more complicated when you give them the option to sort by different fields so you would obviously know better than me how something like this might fit into what you're doing! Just some ideas.

[mhaake]

(sorry didn't realize I was signed in as superteam)

[johnwhelchel]

I agree with you about AJAX. I need to do more reading up on it, but as a quick fix we're actually just loading 500. Next week I'll look into AJAX. I just don't know how hard it will be to combine with live filtering, but I'll give it a go. If Yacob is ok, I'll use Django-South to add that to the models, and then iterate through and fix it. Since we all have the database local right now and backed up, we don't need to worry too much. I'll just make sure to try it at night.