Components are the basic resources of the school, and the use of them is dependent on the school in question. Some schools do not take individual students or classes into account, while others may consider resources like individual students, classes (groups of students), teachers, rooms, teaching equipment and subjects. The different resource types are called categories and they are maintained in Options|Categories.
Components can be any type of resources you want to synchronize together with the courses. You can create up to seven categories to describe different type ofresources, and they are not limited to educational resources. They can be persons, rooms, vechiles, equipment and so on.
Typical examples of components categories are teachers, rooms, groups, persons, equipments. Up to 240 components can be associated for each course and the maximum number of courses + components is 8191.
Components should typically describe unique resources: for instance, each group (of students) should always refer to the same set of persons. If the same person belongs to several groups, Mimosa cannot prevent assigning the same person in the same time. When a course is scheduled in a specific slot, Mimosa requires that all components associated to this course must have a free slot too.
Note that in Options|Timetables you can also uncheck the selection Create timetables for of some component categories, if you do not want Mimosa to check for their double assignments. This is typically done in category Subjects, if you want to add this kind of informative component to some courses.
