Series
A group of problems inside an activity — a round, a week, a class — and the one piece of openness the Server stores rather than derives.
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A series is a group of problems inside an activity. Contest vocabulary calls it a round, a course calls it a week or a class; the label comes from the activity type's renderer, not from the Server.
Slug is unique within its activity. Order sets the position.
Openness is stored, not derived
`IsOpen` is a column
Nothing may compute openness from the dates, or there would be two answers to one question.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
StartDate, EndDate | the schedule. Optional, so an untimed practice activity needs neither. They do not decide whether the series is running — they are what the scheduler acts on and what a countdown is drawn against |
IsOpen | whether the series is running now |
PausedAt | since when a manager has it stopped. A pause takes no submission and stops the countdown |
HideProblemsWhilePaused | whether the pause also took the statements away. Kept so that resuming knows what it is undoing |
The scheduler owns every transition: it sets IsOpen when StartDate passes
and clears it when EndDate does, and a manager pausing or resuming writes it
directly. Every write that moves a date must set it in the same transaction, and
the scheduler corrects any disagreement it finds at startup.
RowVersion gives the row optimistic concurrency, so two Server instances
cannot both open the same series and two managers cannot lose one another's
shift.
What a closed series discloses
RevealProblemCount decides whether a participant may see how many problems a
series holds before it opens. The problems themselves are never sent while it
is closed, whatever this says.
Ranking freeze and ranking window
Two different mechanisms, and the difference is worth holding:
| Fields | What they do |
|---|---|
RankingFreezeAt, RankingRevealAt | the freeze. Between these two instants the Server withholds outcomes, rather than the Client hiding them |
RankingVisibleFrom, RankingVisibleTo | whether there is a board at all for this round. Absent From means the round's own start; absent To means for ever |
The freeze hides late results within a board; the window decides whether the board exists. The window is per round rather than per activity because an organiser publishes the first round's standings while the second is still being fought.
The Server withholds rather than the Client hiding, because the ranking is assembled in the Client: anything sent is disclosed.
Announcement markers
StartAnnouncedAt, EndAnnouncedAt, WindowAnnouncedAt and
UnfrozenAnnouncedAt record what the scheduler has already announced. They are
separate from the state they accompany, and that separation is the point: a
marker answers has this been announced, never is this open. Keeping them
apart makes announcing exactly-once a single conditional update, and makes a
missed announcement recoverable without touching the state.
Importance, and what it is not
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
Importance | how much this series outranks everything else while it runs. While it is running, anything of a lower rank is locked for whoever is taking part in it |
ImportanceScope | Activity (the default) or Installation — how far that reach extends |
Equal ranks survive together, which is what lets two contests share one room. A course marking one round an examination should not lock its students out of every other course on the installation; a laboratory contest should. Both are wanted, so the manager chooses.
Visibility, never permission
The permission model has no subtraction in it. Grants answer who may; importance answers what is reachable while this runs. They are not the same mechanism and importance is not a way to take a permission away.
Address rules
AddressRules are the address ranges this series may be reached from. Empty
means anywhere.
A rule grants and takes away in one act: a series with any rule is served to an address that matches and is absent for every other address, whatever grant the reader holds.
RestrictionsEnabled is the switch for this series alone. Off, it neither hides
nor locks — and it keeps its rules, so turning it back on restores them. A
wrong list on the day of a contest locks out a whole cohort at once, so there
has to be something to clear that is not "delete the configuration and rebuild
it afterwards". The instance carries the same switch for the whole
installation, for when nobody yet knows which series is at fault.
Routing
RunnerTags overrides the activity's. There are two states, not three:
- null inherits the activity's tags, and is what every round holds until somebody decides otherwise;
- a list names the Runners for this round, paired with theirs by the rule in
Tags and routing. A round that wants the general pool
while its course is pinned to a laboratory writes
defaultout.
An empty list would be a third way of writing one of those, and two spellings of one meaning is how a manager ends up unable to tell which they chose.