[WebSoc] Provide indication of cancelled courses

[ecxyzzy]

Currently, WebSoc sections that have been cancelled have no explicit indication thereto in the section response, except through the section comment. We already have a generated column whose value is informed by the section comment for filtering purposes. It would be trivial to add this flag to the section response; the issue is how to convey this in the response.

The naive solution is of course to add an isCancelled field to the section response. However, given that sections retain their pre-cancellation status (sample query: https://anteaterapi.com/v2/rest/websoc?year=2025&quarter=Spring&department=COMPSCI&sectionCodes=34671) which is now semantically meaningless, @Awesome-E proposed that cancelled sections should simply have their status set to "Cancelled" or similar.

I agree that replacing the status would make the most sense, but it would also result in loss of data as the original status is no longer conveyed. However, it can be argued that the original status is no longer relevant once a section is cancelled. Would love to hear your opinions on the matter.

cc: @icssc/api, @icssc/antalmanac, @icssc/peterportal

[sanskarm7]

I assume that when a section's status is set to "cancelled", it is not expected for that to change back, correct?

Under that assumption, I believe Ethan's idea makes the most sense.

[ecxyzzy]

I've personally never seen a section get un-cancelled, but as with all things WebSoc I would not assume that is the case always.

[KevinWu098]

My two cents are that deleting the original status is an unnecessary data loss. I'm not going to die on this hill, but a new field makes more sense to me -- this is an additional piece of data separate from the rest.

Also, wouldn't it be odd to widen the type of status (e.g. open, full) to include cancelled even though that isn't what WebSOC is returning?

[Awesome-E]

When I see this in WebSoC, I would read it as "the course is cancelled" rather than "the course is both cancelled and open".

and I think the API should return it in a manner that reads the same way as I would read WebSoC, even though that might not be the exact text in the exact cell.

I suppose it's fine to add another column if you believe there to be a use case where the status matters (i.e. maybe you still want to know whether the seats were filled beforehand?), but considering that the status column is unpredictable (sometimes it's empty string when cancelled), I don't think that's a practical use case. (Plus, a column name like status kinda implies that there should only be one field with the status)

Even with another field for isCancelled, you'd probably want to write the documentation such that it's clear that isCancelled being true supersedes the status (otherwise it might be confusing to see that there are two statuses). But if that's the case, then why not just set the status to cancelled?

[laggycomputer]

As a matter of principle we should not override existing data and should supply all the data necessary to, say, reconstruct a WebSoc screenshot as above.
A new field would be nice.

[KevinWu098]

As a matter of principle we should not override existing data and should supply all the data necessary to, say, reconstruct a WebSoc screenshot as above. A new field would be nice.

big agree

[charlieweinberger]

I also agree with Dante and Kevin here for creating a new isCancelled field

[sanskarm7]

In the interest of minimizing data loss, a new field makes sense. In terms of structure, it's a little weird having more than one indicator for "status" in my opinion. However, it's not something I'm avidly against. All good with an isCancelled field.

[laggycomputer]

It's been agreed that we should serve some sort of field, e.g. isCancelled as initially proposed, to make the cancellation of a section explicit. AntAlmanac has again raised the point that the fact that a course is cancelled is somewhat urgent for their use-case where users looking at a section are very likely to attempt to enroll in it. Failure to display that the section in question is cancelled could lead to some nasty surprises.