Dance List Templates

Introduction

For teachers in charge of a regular dance class, dance lists in SCDDB are a very helpful tool for lesson planning and keeping track of one’s programmes. But if you’re anything like me, you probably find it very tedious to start each week’s preparation with setting up a dance list that has the correct name, date, settings for times and notes, and standard programme items like “Warmup”. It is of course possible to copy an existing dance list, but wouldn’t it be nice if this could be automated further and made more convenient? Dance list templates are the answer to this plea.

In a nutshell, a dance list template is a special dance list which has been marked as a template. If you have one or more dance list templates among your dance lists, the “Create New List” dialog will offer you to create a new list from an existing dance list template, instead of starting from scratch. The name of the new dance list can be automatically generated from the dance list template, e.g., by incorporating the list’s date or a running count.

Making a Dance List Template

Dance list templates are prepared just like regular dance lists, i.e., you use the “Create New List” dialog to start the list, then go to the “Edit List” dialog to add dances and other list items and/or adjust the list settings using “Edit Settings …” from the “Manage” popup menu.

To convert a dance list to a dance list template, open the “Edit Settings …” dialog, check the “List is a template” box, and save the settings. On the list’s detail page, the list should now be marked as a “(Template)” (near the list type, right below the tab row).

Alternatively, click the “Change Type” link on the dance list detail page and check the “List is a template” box.

Creating a Dance List from a Dance List Template

Once you have defined a dance list template, the “Create new List” dialog will include a “Template” dropdown as the first field. This lets you select one of your dance list templates as the base for the new list being created. Once you pick a template, the name of the new dance list is set to that of the template (you may have to modify it by hand so it becomes unique; later on we will see how to incorporate the date in the name) and the date of the new dance list is set to the current date (you may want to change this). In addition, the list type and privacy checkbox are made invisible because these settings will be taken from the dance list template. Of course, if you don’t select a dance list template from the dropdown menu, everything proceeds as before and you can specify a name, type, date, and privacy setting for the list as usual.

Once the dance list has been created from a dance list template, it is a completely normal dance list which can be edited, printed, etc. in the usual way.

“Dynamic” Dance List Names

If you set the name of the dance list template to something like Class of {day} {monthname} {year}, this will cause the name of a new dance list to be initialised to “Class of 28 April 2023” (or whatever is the current date when you’re making the dance list). If you select a different date from the date picker on the “Create New List” dialog, the name of the new list will be changed accordingly. Once the new dance list has actually been created, the name is frozen and can only be edited in the “Edit Settings …” dialog on the list editing page.

Dance list templates support a variety of special keys which can be specified in a name. The following keys are available:

If you prefer your day and month numbers padded with zeroes, use something like {day:03}, which will output the day as a three-digit number, left-filled with zeroes: 028. As a further example, {year}-{month:02}-{day:02} will display the date in ISO format.

Finally, if you specify a name like Monthly Social Dance {n}, the system will check your dance lists for ones called, e.g., “Monthly Social Dance 23”. It determines the highest number used by all names following this pattern, increments it by 1 and uses the result as the name for the next dance list. It is even smart enough to figure out ordinal numbers, so if your monthly social dances are called “1st Monthly Social Dance”, “2nd Monthly Social Dance”, and so on, then if the most recent one is “52nd Monthly Social Dance” and your dance list template name is {n} Monthly Social Dance, the system knows that the next name in the sequence should be “53rd Monthly Social Dance”.

Dance List Content

Any dances or other items in the dance list template will be copied to the new dance list when it is created based on the dance list template. This includes notes, associated recordings, etc. After that, the dance list is completely independent of the dance list template used to create it, i.e., changes to the dance list template will not impact the dance list and vice versa. The same applies to recordings that are assigned to individual dance list items: The new dance list contains copies of all the recordings in items of the dance list template, but if you add a recording to or delete one from an item in the new dance list, the dance list template will remain unchanged and vice-versa.