source: main/waeup.kofa/trunk/docs/source/userdocs/applicants.rst @ 13077

.. _applicants_section:

Applicants Section :sup:`in progress`
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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.

In contrast to student containers, applicant containers do not contain subcontainers. The only objects they contain are applicant payment tickets (i.e. instances `ApplicantOnlinePayment`). Thus it does not make sense to speak of a  treelike structure. In contrast to the students section