Apply for teacher training - 13. Course Option Validity
Date: 2020-05-01
Status
Accepted
Context
We define a course option as a specific combination of (course, study mode, site). A course has several sites, and each site may offer the course in full time or part time modes. Every course option we create for a course covers one of the combinations.
We've recently completed a series of iterations that deal with:
- course options falling into a state that means they are no longer valid choices for an application
- how to deal with options that fall into this state after they've already been added to a candidate's application
This ADR summarises the design choices made during this phase of work and provides an overview of how various course option states are handled.
Decision
The service currently stops an application being submitted (via error messages on submission) in the following cases:
- The course is full (ie - it has no vacancies at any of its course options)
- The course has been withdrawn by the provider from Find.
- The course has been closed by us on Apply.
- The specific course option chosen by the candidate is full (but other course options have vacancies).
There's a fifth state we handle as well:
- Upon syncing, the Find API tells us that a specific site is no longer related to a course.
For these cases, we:
- try and delete the course options for this site/course combo, OR
- if the course option is part of a candidate's application we set the field
site_still_validtofalseand notify support instead.
Consequences
- We now handle the majority of known 'invalid' course option states.
- There is further analysis underway to decide if, when stopping app submission, it's worthwhile distinguishing between site vacancy and study mode vacancy.