Uploading a .fet file

A .fet file is the whole project, and uploading one brings the whole project across.

Where to upload

There are two places, and they do the same thing:

• New Timetable on your dashboard, choosing the .fet as the file. This creates a fresh timetable and imports into it.
• Upload .fet… in the timetable menu, which imports into the timetable you already have open.

It replaces everything

The menu row says replaces everything, and it means it. Days, hours, teachers, subjects, rooms, buildings, student groups, activities, activity tags and constraints are all cleared and rebuilt from the file.

This is the right behaviour for the job — a FET project is internally consistent, and merging two of them would produce something that is neither — but it does mean you should not upload a .fet into a timetable that has changes you want to keep. Take a backup first if you are unsure.

A bad file cannot destroy your data

The file is parsed and checked before anything is cleared. If it turns out not to be a readable FET project, the import is rejected and your existing timetable is still there, untouched.

The order matters more than it sounds: the alternative — clear first, discover the problem second — is how imports lose people's work.

The same is true of a project that is simply too big for your plan. The file is counted first, and if it holds more activities than your plan allows, the import is refused whole — nothing is cleared and nothing is written. You are told how many the file holds and how many your plan allows.

Refusing the whole file is deliberate. Importing "as much as fits" would hand you a timetable that looks complete and quietly is not, and it would break the round trip this product is built on: what you download would no longer be what you uploaded.

The count is of teaching units, not rows — a split activity counts once. See Plans and limits.

Why it happens in stages

A real school project is tens of thousands of records, which is far more than one web request can handle. So the import runs in slices, each one working for a few seconds and then handing back a progress report.

You will see it counting through the work rather than sitting on a blank screen. When it is created from the dashboard, you are taken to the data screen and the import continues there.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• It is resumable. The import remembers where it got to, so a slow network or a browser hiccup does not send you back to the start.
• It is not instant for a large project. That is the size of the data, not something going wrong.

What comes across

Everything the file declares, including the parts this interface does not show you on screen. Constraint types that have no editor here are still read, stored and written back out unchanged — they travel with the project rather than being dropped because we had nowhere to display them.

Placements come across as FET expresses them, so a solved timetable arrives solved.

After it finishes

You land on the data screen with the imported lists in place. From there:

• Open the app view to read and rearrange the week.
• Check the pre-flight analyzer if you plan to solve again in FET.
• Download the project back out at any point — see Downloading back to FET.

Where to go next

• Which file does what
• Backups — take one before a replacing import.