Potential fix for closed dining locations appearing in list?

[bluelinden]

hey! i'm a prospective RIT student and got nerdsniped (in the new students Discord server) into figuring out why dining halls that are permanently closed still show up in this app.

i'm like 90% sure that locations absent of any events (json path locations[numerical_idx].events[] as obtained from https://tigercenter.rit.edu/tigerCenterApi/tc/dining-all?date=2026-03-23) are permanently closed? i am not super familiar with the codebase of this app so please correct me if i am wrong - i figure it would be a nice QoL improvement if permaclosed locations were grayed out or hidden by default?

i do not know swift and as such i am not sure how to implement it, apologies for the creation of this issue without much research.

thank you so much for all your work on this app.

• blue

[NinjaCheetah]

Hey! Sorry I haven't responded up until now, I somehow never saw a notification for it.

The lack of any scheduled events is kinda-sorta an indicator that the location isn't open anymore? On paper, if there aren't any events for a location in the API response then the location is probably not open anymore, but there's at least one major exception to that. During times like right now, locations that don't have Summer hours have no events, so they'd get removed from the list for that period. Which I guess is not unreasonable if they're never going to be open for the current semester? But I just worry about creating confusion if locations suddenly vanish from the app entirely.

Additionally, sometimes RIT just like- forgets to put hours in. Bytes had no hours for the first couple weeks of the Spring semester, and Petals didn't have hours for the entire year up until Bytes lost its hours and I opened a ticket to get them to fix it. During that period they would've been gone from the app entirely which might have been confusing, especially since they were both actually open.

I think it mostly just comes down to what would be better UX, having all event-less locations always shown but shown as closed or hiding them entirely if they don't have scheduled hours, and I'm not sure which is the most optimal.