> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://api.tipee.ch/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Team Periods

> What is specific to team assignments: one head team at a time, any number of side teams, and what happens when a new head team overlaps an existing one.

A collaborator's team assignment is a **timeline**: assigning a team does not add a record — it makes
that assignment true over a date range, and tipee reshapes the neighbouring periods accordingly.

> **[Timelines](/guides-and-resources/timelines.md)**
>
> **Read this first.** How tipee merges, truncates, splits and deletes periods when you write to a
> timeline — including the two cases most often reported as bugs.

This page covers only what is specific to team assignments.

> [!NOTE]
>
> **Vocabulary.** The API calls *team* what the tipee interface presents as the instance, a site or a
> sector, and the `teams.*` endpoints cover all three. Assignment is narrower: today a collaborator is
> only ever assigned to a **sector**, so the `team_id` below is always a sector id. This may widen in
> a future version.

> [!NOTE]
>
> **This page is being expanded.** It currently describes the points that differ most from the general
> timeline rules. Fuller documentation, with the identity fields and worked examples, is coming.

## One head sector, several side ones

Every assignment carries a `head` boolean. At any given date, a collaborator has **at most one head
sector**, and that assignment behaves like any other timeline: its periods never overlap each other.

**Side sectors are not subject to that constraint.** A collaborator can hold several side sectors at
the same time, so the "one period at a time" rule does not apply to them.

## Assigning a head sector demotes the previous one

> [!WARNING]
>
> This is a deliberate deviation from the general rules.
>
> Where the general case has an overlapping period truncated or removed, a head sector assigned over an
> existing head sector **does not delete it**. The previous assignment is kept and becomes a **side**
> sector instead.
>
> Nothing is lost — but the collaborator ends up with one more side sector than you may have expected.
> Read the assignments back with `resources.show-teams` after the write if that matters to you.


This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.