Applicants Section

Applicants and students are different entities and stored in different places. Moreover, the students section is completely independent from the applicants section. Kofa can be configured without its applicants module but not without its students module.

Anonymous users can self-register and automatically become applicants (users) of the portal. The number of applicants is not limited and, theoretically, Kofa can host hundredthousands of applicants in various applicants containers. Usually, only a few of them are beeing accepted for studying at the university. Once the application process has ended, admitted applicants are transformed into student records. New student records are created and the data are copied from the applicant records. When this ‘student creation’ process is finished, the applicant records are dispensable. Aim was to provide an easy way to get rid of the huge batches of applicant records by only one click, in order to keep the database clean and tidy. The process is described further below.

Note

The term ‘application’ has a double meaning in English. An ‘application’ in computer sciences stands for a software or web application. Software developers may get confused by using the term in a different context. To take this into account, we prefer to speak of ‘applicant’ in this documentation, instead of ‘application’ although, in the linguistic context, it sometimes makes more sense to speak of the latter. However, in the user interface (UI) and also in Python docstrings the term ‘application’ predominates.

Much like students, applicants are also users of the portal and the applicant object is a user account surrogate, see Applicants and Students. In the following we always refer to the applicant container when talking about an applicant.

In contrast to student containers, applicant containers do not contain subcontainers. The only objects they contain are applicant payment tickets (i.e. instances of ApplicantOnlinePayment). Thus the hierarchy is flat and not really treelike as the students section. Also, applicants (applicant containers) are stored in different parent containers (instances of IApplicantsContainer). There is not one single parent container like in the students section but one container for each application session and application type:

Applicants Section (ApplicantsRoot)
|
+---> ApplicantsContainer
      |
      +---> Applicant
            |
            +-----> ApplicantOnlinePayment