Course credits field

[John Milner]

Should course.credits be required? A lot of TC courses have credits=None, which causes this ugliness:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/opt/sword/ecwsp/sis/models.py", line 486, in _calculate_grade_for_single_course

    credit = float(course.credits) / float(course.marking_period.count())

TypeError: float() argument must be a string or a number

We deal with this now by doing try/except: pass, essentially treating these courses as if they had zero credits. I'd argue that we should force registrars to consciously set the field to 0.

[David Burke]

Why not use a default field instead? The default could be configurable.

David Burke
davidmburke.com

[John Milner]

I think it should be blank by default when creating a course and fail validation if the registrar doesn't enter a value.

Really, it's a question of minimizing data entry error. The gross exception is easy to dispense with using .exclude(credits=None), but it still seems really easy to accidentally (and silently) exclude a course from being included in GPA calculations.

[David Burke]

Ok.

and as for removing gross try excepts absolutely

David Burke
davidmburke.com

[John Milner]

I'll make a low-priority ticket about it. I'll have to figure out how to get South to set a default value (0) where it was NULL (or empty?) before.