The Graduate Office needs to be able to set up all three rotations at once

[sersorrel]

Currently, the Graduate Office has to set up each rotation one-at-a-time, once the previous rotation is finished. This is far from ideal – the dates for all three rotations each year are decided in the summer before the first rotation begins, so it would be much better if the Graduate Office could enter all the dates at once.

The entire system is built around the assumption that there will only be one "active" rotation at a time, and that this will be the latest rotation, so this is likely to be difficult to implement without rewriting large parts of the system.

One approach (but probably not the best approach) would be to schedule a job to automatically create each rotation as it approaches its first deadline; the date at which each rotation is created could be determined automatically, or entered by the user. However, if a previous rotation has its deadlines extended, then it's important that the new rotation is not created until the previous rotation is finished – presumably the rotation-creation job would check to see if, by some metric, the previous rotation is "done", and if it's not, it would send the Graduate Office a warning email and reschedule itself to try again in (e.g.) a day's time.

However, it would really be better if, eventually, the system could properly cope with multiple unfinished rotations existing at the same time.