Implementation requires a section to meet at the same time and location every time it meets (W)

[afig]

The current implementation of Gradebook allows a section to meet any number of days of the week, but assumes that it will meet at the same time and location every time it meets. In reality, and in the test data, sections meet at different times and locations (common in classes that have a "lab" component).

In the OpenClose data, when sections meet at different times on different days (and possibly also with different locations), the OpenClose schedule shows one row with full data for the section, directly followed by one or more rows with only the following attributes: Days, Time, Dates, Location, and Instructors. As a result, these rows are copied into the staging table, but are ignored during the import procedure with a few WHERE clauses during the insert into the Course and Section relations.

Specifically, these rows are ignored through the clauses: WHERE NOT Subject IS NULL and WHERE NOT Course IS NULL on lines 124 and 125, and by WHERE NOT oc.CRN IS NULL on line 202 of prepareCourseScheduleImport.sql (see the file in question here).

This seems to be the cause of most (but not all) of the section information lost during import: the Spring 2017 Open Close data has 1757 rows of section data, but only 1450 sections are imported into Gradebook by the import script.

Issue originally noted by @smurthys, and confirmed by @griffine and myself.