README

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PLANNER 
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`planner` is a small utility to plan course selection when the courses 
have dependencies. since I did it for myself mainly, it's not awfully
configurable or smooth, but may still be useful once you understand its 
input.

The program reads course data from a Sqlite3 database "courses.db" in the 
current directory. Use any Sqlite utility to examine the scema, since you'll
have to edit the database anyway if you want to use it for yourself. The 
current data in the example file represents the advanced-year selection 
for Mechanical Engineering students in Tel Aviv University, 2005.

Supplementary tables give the semesters when each course is given, and the
course dependencies.

When running planner, you'll get a vertically-scrollable table whose columns 
represent semesters, and in each column you'll see boxes for each course
given in that semester. Each box has 4 minibuttons: those marked 'D' mean
select (left) or deselect (right) with dependencies. Below them - select 
without touching the dependencies. When you hit select, the course will 
light up, and when selecting with dependencies - so will those. the oposite 
happens on deselect.


Building
--------

This is a Qt4 application, so you'll need the Qt development environment,
as well as qmake. 

Once you have this, simply type:

  $ qmake
  $ make
  $ ./planner


Implementation
--------------

There is a lot in Qt that could be used to make this app's code simpler.
The current design started in a Qt3 version where those features weren't 
available. It was also, when first written, my first Qt program, in any 
language. So there's a lot of improvement possible.

The same caveat goes for the use of C++11 features - they didn't exist in 
2005 when this was first written, so don;t exdpect to see too many of them.
Perhaps I'll introduce some later as I use this code as a learning playground.