Making an appointment

One of the missing features is that a teacher cannot use the usual Scheduler graphical user interface (GUI) to add a student to a timeslot in the schedule.  To address this I made a simple make_appointment.py  Download make_appointment.py 

program  that can be used to add a student to a given appointment time slot. The interface is:

./make_appointment.py  4350 657 "corrected groupmate"

or

./make_appointment.py  4350 657

The generic command format is:

 ./make_appointment.py calendar_event_id participant_id [comment]

where the comment string is optional. If this is not provided, then the comment will be: "appointment made by instructor".

The original make_appointment.py program was enhanced to have a "-f" option to force the appointment, this will cancel any other appointment in this appointment group for this student.

A negative feature of the above program is that you have to know the calendar_event_id and the student's ID (i.e., the participant_id). It should be possible to use the calendar appointment group and the login_id of the student, but this is a program for another day.

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Note that if the appointment group is set up for groups to signup, they you can make an appointment for a group:

./make_appointment.py 5108  408 "updated by instructor"

Where 5108 is a calendar_event_id for a group time slot (in this case for a slot on 13 Friday 2017 at 13:00 (local time)) and 408 is a grouup id (in this case for Project Groups P1P2 3).

Note that one difficulty is that one can only create group appointment for an entire course and not for a single section of a course. (This is a current limitation as described at https://guides.instructure.com/m/4152/l/59601-how-do-i-create-an-appointment-group-in-the-scheduler Links to an external site..)

You can see whether an appointment group is for users or for groups by looking at the value of participant_type. This will be either "User" or "Group".