Course registration

Students register for courses each semester inside a window, subject to prerequisites, credit limits and capacity. Lecturers get class lists; administrators open and close the window.

The most-attempted final-year project, and the hardest schema here: nine resources, a four-level academic hierarchy, and a table that relates courses to other courses.

Resource	What it holds
Faculty → Department → Programme	The academic tree
Course	Code, title, credit units
Prerequisite	Course X requires course Y
Semester	And the registration window
Student, Lecturer	The people
Offering	A course, taught this semester, with a capacity
Registration	A student on an offering

The two ideas

A course is not an offering. CS301 Operating Systems exists in the catalogue permanently. CS301, taught by Dr Okello in Semester 1 2026/27, capacity 120 is a different thing that happens once. Register students against the offering and class lists, capacity and timetables all work. Register against the course and you cannot tell this year’s class from last year’s.

A prerequisite relates a course to a course. Not a column — a course can require three others. It is a many-to-many from a table to itself, which sounds exotic and is just a junction with two belongsTo pointing the same way:

npx flare gen resource Prerequisite --fields 'course:belongsTo(Course), requires:belongsTo(Course)'

Both point at Course. Flare writes two foreign keys, two indexes, two separate pickers in the form, and the relation names Prisma needs to tell them apart. Read a row as a sentence: this course requires that one.

1. The app

Next.js

pnpm create flare-framework registration
cd registration
docker compose up -d

Cloudflare

pnpm create flare-framework registration --stack cloudflare
cd registration

2. The academic tree

npx flare gen resource Faculty --icon landmark --group Structure \
  --fields 'name:string!'

npx flare gen resource Department --icon building --group Structure \
  --fields 'name:string!, faculty:belongsTo(Faculty)'

npx flare gen resource Programme --icon graduation-cap --group Structure \
  --fields 'name:string!, durationYears:int, department:belongsTo(Department)'

npx flare gen resource Course --icon book-open --group Structure \
  --fields 'code:string!, title:string, creditUnits:int, department:belongsTo(Department)'

Generate them in this order. Each belongsTo needs its target to exist, so the tree is built from the root down — and if you get it wrong the error names the missing resource.

3. Prerequisites

npx flare gen resource Prerequisite --icon git-branch --group Structure \
  --fields 'course:belongsTo(Course), requires:belongsTo(Course)'

Nothing stops you entering a cycle — CS301 requires CS302 requires CS301 — and nothing in a schema can. That check is a graph walk at the point of entry, and it is yours to write. It is also a good thing to be asked about.

4. The window

npx flare gen resource Semester --icon calendar-range --group Structure \
  --fields 'name:string, academicYear:string, regOpensAt:datetime, regClosesAt:datetime, current:boolean'

The window is two timestamps on the semester, not a flag somebody remembers to toggle. “Is registration open” is then a comparison rather than a thing that can be left on all year.

5. People and offerings

npx flare gen resource Student --icon user --group People \
  --fields 'regNumber:string!, fullName:string, yearOfStudy:int, status:enum(active,suspended,graduated), userId:string?, programme:belongsTo(Programme)'

npx flare gen resource Lecturer --icon user-pen --group People \
  --fields 'staffNumber:string!, fullName:string, userId:string?, department:belongsTo(Department)'

npx flare gen resource Offering --icon layers --group Registration \
  --fields 'capacity:int, course:belongsTo(Course), semester:belongsTo(Semester), lecturer:belongsTo(Lecturer)?'

lecturer is optional because timetabling happens after the catalogue is set, and a required field would mean inventing an assignment to save a row.

6. Registration

npx flare gen resource Registration --icon check-square --group Registration \
  --fields 'status:enum(pending,approved,rejected,dropped), rejectedBecause:text if status == rejected, registeredAt:datetime, student:belongsTo(Student), offering:belongsTo(Offering)'

dropped is a status, not a deletion. A student who drops a course in week three has a record of having been on it, which matters when the fee has already been charged.

7. Run it

npx flare migrate
npx flare seed:resource Faculty 5
npx flare seed:resource Department 15
npx flare seed:resource Programme 20
npx flare seed:resource Course 80
npx flare seed:resource Prerequisite 40
npx flare seed:resource Semester 4
npx flare seed:resource Student 150
npx flare seed:resource Offering 60
npx flare seed:resource Registration 200
npx flare dev

Nine resources, root of the tree first. Sixty-six migrations applied and a registration system with real data in it — before you have written a line.

What you still owe

Every rule, and the rules are the project. The schema cannot express a single one of these:

• Prerequisites met. Before approving, walk the student’s completed courses against the prerequisites of the one they want. This needs a Result or Transcript resource the brief leaves implicit — model it.
• The credit cap. Sum the credit units of a student’s approved registrations this semester and refuse above the limit, which usually varies by programme and year.
• Capacity. Count approved registrations against Offering.capacity. And because two students can pass that check in the same instant, back it with a unique constraint on (studentId, offeringId) and a transaction — a check-then-insert is a race, always.
• The window. Refuse outside regOpensAt–regClosesAt, on the server. A disabled button is a courtesy, not a rule.
• Timetable clashes, which need the timetable the brief does not model.
• The registration slip as a PDF, and class lists exported for lecturers.

Make it yours

• Students see only their own registrations. The owner is on Student, not the registration, so this is a hook — the same shape as fees and the clinic.
• Lock the catalogue. npx flare gen policy Course --roles admin and the same for Programme and Prerequisite. Students read the offerings, never the structure.
• Soft delete offerings, so cancelling a class does not take its registrations with it.

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That is the last of the ten. If you build one properly — schema from the brief, rules in hooks, the honest section at the bottom written up as your contribution — you have a final-year project, and you spent your time on the part that is actually yours.