Sessions, Floors, and the Schedule

Overview

A Session is a block of competition time on a specific floor — "Saturday Matinee on the Main Floor," for example. Sessions are the backbone of everything that gets scheduled: events are assigned to a session, rounds inherit their event's session, and the final schedule is built session by session.

This page explains how floors and sessions fit together, when to create them, and how they carry through to rounds and the program.

Why Sessions Matter

Almost every scheduling decision in the system flows through sessions:

• Events are assigned to a session when you create them.
• Rounds default to their event's session when generated, and can be moved to a different session afterward.
• The Schedule is generated per session, in the order the rounds are arranged within each one.

A round with no session is treated as Unscheduled and is silently skipped when the schedule is generated — it simply won't appear in your program. Getting sessions right early prevents that.

Start With Floors

One floor per physical space

When you create a competition, the system automatically creates a single floor named Main Floor. Most competitions never need another one.

Create additional floors only when you genuinely have separate physical spaces running at the same time — a second ballroom, a side room for preliminary heats. A floor represents a place, not a way to organize time.

If your goal is just to reduce runtime by running more than one event at once in the same ballroom, don't create another floor. Instead, group those rounds into a single schedule item on the Program page (see Running Two Rounds at Once below). Extra floors mean extra sessions to build and maintain, and each floor's capacity feeds round-size estimates, so adding floors you don't physically have will distort your planning.

Steps: adding a floor

1. Open the competition and go to Competition → Floors.
2. Click New Floor.
3. Fill in Floor Name, an optional Description, and Capacity — the maximum number of couples that can be on that floor at once (defaults to 12).
4. Click Submit.

Creating Sessions

Create your sessions as soon as you've decided how many floors you'll have and roughly how the days break down. Everything downstream depends on them.

Each session is bound to one floor. That binding is what lets sessions run in parallel: the Main Floor can run ballroom events all day while a second floor runs preliminary Cabaret and Breaking rounds in their own session at the same time. Nothing in the system prevents sessions from overlapping in time — on the same floor or different ones — so double-check your times yourself.

Tip: prefer several smaller sessions over one large one

Sessions are the unit you order rounds and schedule items within, so the more events you pile into a single session, the harder that session is to work with.

Consider a typical collegiate competition. If everything runs under one "Saturday Matinee" session, that session becomes home to all 48 events and roughly 100 rounds — a single long list to keep in the right order on the Round Order page.

Split the same competition into four sessions instead — Saturday Matinee Smooth, Saturday Matinee Standard, Saturday Matinee Rhythm, and Saturday Matinee Latin — and each one holds about 12 events and 26 rounds. Same competition, same floor, but each session tab is now a list you can actually scan and reorder with confidence.

Splitting by style, level, or time block costs nothing extra and makes both round ordering and schedule item management noticeably easier.

Steps

1. Go to Competition → Sessions.
2. Click New Session.
3. Fill in the form and click Submit.

Field Reference

The Sessions page lists sessions grouped by day, showing Order, Start Time, End Time, Session, Location (the floor), and Status. A session whose status is Completed can no longer be edited.

Note: Deleting a session is destructive beyond the session itself. Any Dynamic Event assigned to that session is deleted along with it — and deleting a Dynamic Event deletes the events it generated and their entries. Regular events and rounds are safer: they simply lose their session assignment and become Unscheduled. Reassign anything you want to keep before deleting a session.

Assigning Events to Sessions

Every event needs a session, however it was created:

• Manually created events — pick the Session on the event form. It's required.
• Dynamic Events — the generated events inherit the session configured on the Dynamic Event template. If the template has no session, the generated events won't have one either, and their rounds will land in Unscheduled. See the Dynamic Events guide.

You can review session assignments at a glance on Events → Event Overview, which includes a Session column.

Generating Rounds

Once registration is closed — or at least once you don't expect many more entry changes — you can generate rounds. The system doesn't force you to wait, but round sizes are calculated from the current entry counts, and regenerating rounds for an event deletes that event's existing rounds first. Generating too early means redoing the work.

Go to Rounds & Flights → Round Details and use Generate Rounds under Quick Actions, or generate them per event from the event's Rounds tab. You can also create rounds manually.

Moving rounds between sessions

Each generated round is assigned to its event's session by default, but you can move it. This is the standard workflow for championship events: the event lives in the matinee session, so all its rounds generate there, but you want the final to run in the evening session.

1. Go to Rounds & Flights → Round Details and select the round.
2. Open the General tab.
3. Change the Session dropdown.
4. Click Save Changes.

Note: Changing a round's session doesn't reposition it within the new session — it keeps its previous ordering value and may land anywhere in the list. After moving rounds, go to Round Order and drag them into the right place. You can't drag a round between session tabs there; the session itself must be changed on the round's General tab.

Ordering Rounds

Rounds & Flights → Round Order shows one tab per session, plus an Unscheduled tab for rounds with no session, and a total duration for each. Rounds are dragged into the order you want them to run.

The page opens with Edit Lock turned on — flip it off before dragging. Only rounds that haven't started yet can be reordered, and rounds sitting out of their event's natural sequence are visually flagged so you can spot mistakes.

Anything still in the Unscheduled tab will not appear in the generated schedule. Clear that tab before moving on.

Generating the Schedule

When the round order is final, click Generate Schedule on the Round Order page.

The schedule is built from your rounds, session by session, in their session order. It produces a list of Schedule Items, one per round by default — the assumption being that you run one round at a time. Estimated start and end times are calculated from each round's heat count, dances, music length, and walk-on time, and everything downstream re-times automatically when something changes.

Generation covers the whole competition at once, not one session at a time.

Note: Regenerating the schedule deletes and rebuilds all heat items. Manually added items like breaks, awards, and ceremonies survive, but they keep their original positions and may end up in the wrong place relative to the new heats. Any manual grouping of rounds (below) is also lost. Do your round ordering first, generate once, then fine-tune.

Running Two Rounds at Once

A schedule item can hold more than one round. This is how you run two rounds simultaneously on the same floor — Novice Standard and Championship Standard together, for instance — to cut runtime.

Steps

1. Go to Schedule → Program.
2. Find the session tab and the two schedule items you want to combine.
3. Drag the round out of one schedule item and drop it into the other.
4. Delete the now-empty schedule item using its More → Delete menu.

When a schedule item holds several rounds, its duration becomes the longest of them rather than the sum — the system treats grouped rounds as running concurrently, which is exactly what you want here. Subsequent items shift earlier automatically.

Deleting a schedule item never deletes its rounds; they return to the Unscheduled panel for that session, where you can drag them back into any item.

You can also insert new items — breaks, awards, ceremonies, announcements — using the + buttons between panels.

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