Dance List Volumes

This has now been mostly implemented.

Q. What are dance list volumes?

A. With many dance groups now creating dance lists for their weekly classes, keeping track of large numbers of related dance lists can be something of a chore. The idea behind dance list volumes is that we will be able to create a new volume, say “Frankfurt SCD Club Classes 2023”, and add all the 2023-class dance lists to that volume. People will then be able to browse the list of volumes, which should be less cluttered than the list of dance lists, to find the correct volume, and then inspect the content of the volume to find out about all the dance lists within it.

Q. Why are these groups of dance lists called “volumes” and not “groups”?

A. Because we’re using the term “group” already in various contexts (e.g., user groups, i.e., collections of users on the system, and SCD groups, i.e., congregations of people who do SCD together in one location) and we don’t want to make things more confusing than they already are.

Q. What else can we do with dance list volumes?

A. Every dance list volume has a detail page (similar to the detail pages for other database objects such as dances, albums, or dance lists). This offers a number of tabs that afford different views of the volume:

• The “Lists” tab shows a list of all the dance lists in the volume. Individual dance lists can be expanded to show their content; this makes it unnecessary to navigate to that dance list’s detail page.
• The “Dances” tab shows a sorted list of all the dances across all lists in the volume (similar to the existing “Latest Occurrences” table).
• The “Publications” tab shows the publications that the dances on the lists have been drawn from. This makes it easy to identify popular publications.
• The “Recordings” tab shows the recordings that have been associated with dance list items (if any). (NB. This is not yet implemented.)
• The “Statistics” tab shows some statistics about the lists and their content. This includes, e.g., the number of dances on a list, the distribution of reels/jigs/strathspeys/medleys, and so on. (NB. This is not yet implemented.)

Q. Can dance list volumes be associated with a calendar date?

A. Not explicitly. But a dance list volume will know the dates associated with the “earliest” and “latest” lists within it (as long as the dance lists have dates, of course). This will still make it possible to sort the volumes into chronological order, e.g., by the earliest list in them.

Q. Can a dance list be part of more than one volume?

A. Absolutely. This makes it possible for, e.g., the “52nd Frankfurt Spring Ball” dance list to appear in both the “FSCDC Events 2023” and “Frankfurt Spring Balls” volumes.

Q. Can a dance list volume contain other dance list volumes?

A. That would be a neat feature. We may not include it in the first implementation but in the long run it might be useful to have. (NB. This is not yet implemented.)

Q. What about privacy?

A. Dance list volumes will have the same privacy settings as dance lists, i.e., they can be private, public, or visible to the members of a specific user group only. For private volumes, only the owner will be able to add dance lists; for group-owned volumes, anybody in the group will be able to do that.

Q. Must all dance lists in a volume be public?

A. No. When a user visits a volume they only get to see those dance lists that they would also be able to see in the “Dance Lists” overview page – to be precise, “private” dance lists only if they own them, and group-visible dance lists only if they are a member of the group in question. Public dance lists are, of course, visible to all users (including not-signed-in users) as usual.

The visibility of a volume is completely independent of the visibility of the dance lists it contains. A volume could be private and contain only public dance lists; then nobody (other than its owner) would be able to view the volume’s content (even though it would be perfectly possible for them to view the dance lists in question through the “Dance Lists” overview page; it’s just that they won’t even know that the dance list is part of the volume if the volume is private).

Q. How will we be able to assign a list to a volume?

A. There will be a suitable setting in the list details (probably on the dance list editing page) where you can pick one or more volumes for the dance list. There may also be a way to add dance lists from a volume detail page, similar to how publications are added to collections now, plus a feature that will let you add all of your dance lists whose name follows a certain pattern. (IOW, Anselm is not keen on adding tens of “FSCDC Class” lists per year to retroactive dance list volumes individually. As we know, software development is all about scratching one’s own itches.)

Q. I suppose we will also be able to remove a list from a volume if we have to?

A. Naturally. You will also be able to remove whole volumes if you no longer want them (providing you own them).