Classrooms and laboratories

The room master is a one-off setup task, done once when the school is onboarded and touched again only when a building changes. It matters because two other modules depend on it: the timetable uses rooms to detect clashes before publish, and lab bookings inherit their room from the timetable period they are created from. Room numbers are unique across the school, so decide a naming convention before bulk entry.

The same workspace is served at /classrooms and /infrastructure - they are the same screen, and /classroom in the singular redirects to it. Access is narrow: Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal, Admin and Support Staff - Facilities. There is no read-only tier here, so anyone who can open the list can also edit it, and teachers cannot open it at all.

Setup workflow

1. Create rooms at /classrooms with a name, a unique room number, and optionally building, floor and total desks.
2. Link a room to a class where it is that class’s regular base; the link is optional and clears rather than blocks if the class is later removed.
3. Assign rooms to timetable periods while generating or hand-editing the grid at /timetable.
4. Maintain lab equipment at /laboratories, keeping the operational status current - equipment marked out of service cannot be attached to a booking.

Usage workflow

1. Resolve room clashes in the timetable before publishing; an unresolved clash is a scheduling error, not a warning the product suppresses.
2. From a timetable period, book a linked lab session - it takes the period’s class, subject, teacher, start and end time, and defaults to the next occurrence of that weekday.
3. Override the date if you need a different week, but it must still fall on the same weekday as the period.
4. Attach equipment to the session when a specific apparatus is needed.
5. Class teachers use /my-class as their hub for the roster and related class links; they do not manage rooms.

Booking guards

What breaks if you skip a step

• No rooms in the master: the timetable can still be generated, but nothing checks whether two classes are sitting in the same place.
• Stale equipment status: bookings that should be blocked go through, and the apparatus is double-committed on the day.
• Room number reused: creation fails outright, because the room number is unique school-wide.
• Rooms deleted while timetable periods still point at them: fix the grid before removing the room rather than after.

Handoff and limits

Rooms hand off to the timetable, which owns period-level room assignment and clash detection, and to laboratories, which own equipment, sessions and incident records. Nothing in this module feeds attendance, fees or examinations. Booking a lab session is limited to timetable structure managers - Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal and Admin - even though teachers and lab assistants can see and work with laboratories generally.

• Lab bookings created from a timetable period do not consult the academic calendar, so the next matching weekday can land on a holiday - check the date before confirming.
• Total desks is recorded on the room but is not enforced against class size anywhere.
• Room bookings for non-teaching use are stored separately from timetable periods and do not appear on the weekly grid.