Pulling Data from SIMs to Display Certificates

[ADT]

OK so currently at the beginning of every year we print out a set of certificates... on special card...  for each of our lower school kids to be given out during the year!!!

Bronze...  Silver...  Gold.....  each with their name on....  so give or take a bit...    3300 certificates....  printed on a normal printer...... on special card...  by one women...  and then each hand signed by the head!!!!!!!!

Needless to say I suggested moving it to Frog....  so have come up with picture/text that will display depending on the award they are on.  Using rules I can hide the certificates I don't want and turn one on depending on a group the kids are in.

I want to try and make it as automated as possible...  at the moment a member of our admin team updates a sheet it Sims with the date each certificate is printed/handed out....  which she works out from another sheet  in SIMs.... which we as tutors key in how many stamps the kids get each week.

Ive played around with the idea of using the House Field in SIMs as we don't have houses...  but ive been told there would be no way to automatically update houses when kids reach the stamp limits.

It has been suggested that a A UDF could be set up for this purpose and would be far more suitable whatever that is...  I though the UDF was a NI terrorist group!!!!  Unfortunately our SIMs lady is off on the sick...  and even if we could set one up I doubt Frog pulls that in!!

So anyway to cut a long story short...  does anyone else have any ideas???

Thanks in advance!!

[Simon Law]

1 hour ago, ADT said:

It has been suggested that a A UDF could be set up for this purpose and would be far more suitable whatever that is...  I though the UDF was a NI terrorist group!!!!  Unfortunately our SIMs lady is off on the sick...  and even if we could set one up I doubt Frog pulls that in!!

my searches suggest a UDF is a User Defined Field within SIMS,

So the field has a number of different type eg Date, Number, Text

The Number for example could be called 'Gold' and have a range eg 1500 - 2000

But as My MIS hero is on annual leave, I can't ask him either.

 

The idea of the paperless praise is excellent for both the trees, the printer, the lady printing and of course your head's hand.

I will ponder

[ADT]

1 hour ago, Simon Law said:

my searches suggest a UDF is a User Defined Field within SIMS,

So the field has a number of different type eg Date, Number, Text

The Number for example could be called 'Gold' and have a range eg 1500 - 2000

But as My MIS hero is on annual leave, I can't ask him either.

 

The idea of the paperless praise is excellent for both the trees, the printer, the lady printing and of course your head's hand.

I will ponder

See we have a field in a SIMs marksheet that calculates the award...  I just need to figure out how to use that data in a way Frog can import it!!

Seams everyone's MIS Hero's is off...   even Frogs MIS Hero is!!

[ADT]

Where's super @pconkie when you need him...  he'll know....  or know someone that would.....

[Simon Law]

31 minutes ago, ADT said:

Where's super @pconkie when you need him...  he'll know....  or know someone that would.....

Just another MIS Hero on the missing list!

[adamw]

Sounds like you could build a widget in Frog that handles both the adding of points and the displaying of the data - unless you're required to keep this data in SIMS? Not sure how much work creating the widget would be - seems like it could have a bit of complexity.

 

[ADT]

18 minutes ago, adamw said:

Sounds like you could build a widget in Frog that handles both the adding of points and the displaying of the data - unless you're required to keep this data in SIMS? Not sure how much work creating the widget would be - seems like it could have a bit of complexity.

 

Seams a bit crazy to recreate something that already works!!  I just need to get the data to Frog!!

[ADT]

While I'm on anyone played with the house field in SIMs??

I kind of got one of the guys to add a house...  and now we can't delete it???

Ooops!! 

[pconkie]

@ADT

If you're going to stick with SIMS you need to get the total [int] or 'bronze', ;silver', 'gold' [string] into frog.

Two ways of doing this as far as I can tell -

1. You need to hijack a field that the frog extractor pulls in. I guess this is why you were looking at Houses?  If you created three Houses in SIMS (gold, silver, bronze) students would then belong to one of these groups when pulled into frog and you could show/hide certificates based on group membership.  I can't think of a way you can easily (automatically) update the child's House though.  There would be a way to do it without someone having to update 3300 ticks manually.  Export the SIMS marksheet to excel, run a macro to transform the data a bit, import the spreadsheet as a SIMS membership file. Probably have to do this for each year group. I don't think the extractor brings in any user defined fields, so i'm not sure where you can go with that?

2. Just use the SIMS marksheet you already have.  There is a little command line program in the SIMS directory that can be used to export it on a schedule as an xml, csv or xls file. Use the squid proxy server in your frog 3 box (so it works on or off site) to read it on demand from a network share.  Use javascript to show/hide the correct certificate. You haven't thrown frog 3 away yet, right? For a froglearn only solution perhaps the same can be achieved using a network files widget? need to do some testing....

For end to end automation stop using SIMS for data entry and calculations and do it all through frog.  Oh wait, there is no data store available in frog! Ok, I mean use frog and some cloud database solution. Oh wait, with GDPR coming in we better not store data in the cloud......better stop sending emails too.....are you sure you would rather not stick with paper (sorry, really nice card)!

Paul

[pconkie]

4 hours ago, ADT said:

While I'm on anyone played with the house field in SIMs??

I kind of got one of the guys to add a house...  and now we can't delete it???

Ooops!! 

On the curriculum screen

Right click --> remove selected membership

Save

[ADT]

See I knew @pconkie would have an plan!!!!

Looks like I was on the right lines using the house field!!! Was thinking export import job..... but if I need to export I might as well just import the groupings straight to Frog!!!

Option 2 sounds promising....  we could be going all Froglearn by summer....  if Frog sort Forms like we've been promised for years!!!!

As for option 3....... we'll all sounds a bit tongue in cheek to me!!!!

O and I'll have to test your delete house steps...  hopefully it'll work!!!

Thanks mate!!!

[ADT]

On a slightly different note...  can anyone come up with a suggestion of how we could display the same Certificate on the parent portal????  No point it only showing up on the Student account we want it to display on the Parents Account as well!!

[pconkie]

55 minutes ago, ADT said:

On a slightly different note...  can anyone come up with a suggestion of how we could display the same Certificate on the parent portal????  No point it only showing up on the Student account we want it to display on the Parents Account as well!!

FrogCode or html.  There is an api that gives you access to the parents children. From there you might be able to get the groups each child belongs to.  If you can then you could have a simple:     if this group then show this certificate type statement.  I think I have something where parents can view the teachers of their child, but that might come from using the timetable api (which wouldn't include House) rather than the groups api....

[ADT]

38 minutes ago, pconkie said:

FrogCode or html.  There is an api that gives you access to the parents children. From there you might be able to get the groups each child belongs to.  If you can then you could have a simple:     if this group then show this certificate type statement.  I think I have something where parents can view the teachers of their child, but that might come from using the timetable api (which wouldn't include House) rather than the groups api....

I see the potential.......  Just need some one at Frog to confirm its all possible......  @Graham Quince 

[pconkie]

Can you send the three certificates? I;ll mock something up if time.

[ADT]

1 minute ago, pconkie said:

Can you send the three certificates? I;ll mock something up if time.

Ive done the visuals....  and we have more than 3!!!  Like you say we just need to find a way for a parent to be passed a students "group" and then display the according visuals!!

See this was dead easy in Frog 3... a parent could use the Select User brick to choose a child (they could only see their own) and then it could update another widget!!!

[ADT]

Is Craig not back yet........  skiving toe rag!!

Anymore thought on how we can get the data in...  or how I could display the same graphics to parents as well as students???

Also to add extra issues....  I will need a way to show siblings certificates on the parent account.

Thanks in advance!

@Simon Law @adamw @Graham Quince 

[ADT]

Craig must be back by now...... 

What does it mean by other on the Knowledge Base MIS Integration sections...

Groups/Membership has other listed???

Could a field be used there that can automatically change depending on a total next to it???

@Simon Law @adamw @Graham Quince 

[adamw]

On 18/05/2018 at 13:30, ADT said:

Ive done the visuals....  and we have more than 3!!!  Like you say we just need to find a way for a parent to be passed a students "group" and then display the according visuals!!

See this was dead easy in Frog 3... a parent could use the Select User brick to choose a child (they could only see their own) and then it could update another widget!!!

FDP/2/User/GetChildren - pass the parent uuid as a param and you will get back a list of all the children that the parent is associated with. Then, FDP/2/Group/Memberships - pass the uuid of the child selected and you will get all the groups that child is a member of. 

You could streamline step1, because we already have a select user widget, and if used by a parent it only shows their current children.

Will that get you what you need?

[ADT]

4 minutes ago, adamw said:

FDP/2/User/GetChildren - pass the parent uuid as a param and you will get back a list of all the children that the parent is associated with. Then, FDP/2/Group/Memberships - pass the uuid of the child selected and you will get all the groups that child is a member of. 

You could streamline step1, because we already have a select user widget, and if used by a parent it only shows their current children.

Will that get you what you need?

Maybe....  not that I fully get what you are trying to tell me...

We are still debating how to get the data into Frog...  Craig is now on it so lets hope he can come up with a solution to that problem first!!

[ADT]

@adamw  The way I see it is this....

Parent can pick a kid...  and it will update the nested page to show the kids certificate based on a the group they are in!!

Could have done it in Frog 3...... without all this coding stuff......  just saying!!!

 

[ADT]

@adamw

Looking again I suppose something like how the MyFrog apps works on the  Frog bar...  choose a kid... get that kids assignment!!!

But I want choose a kids... see that kids certificates!!

[savillecj]

Hi Adrian,

I've had a read through what you're trying to do, and while I don't fully understand how you're storing this data, I believe what you're trying to do is put students in to a "Gold" class if they have above 1500 points etc. You then want to display the gold certificates in Frog if they're in the "gold" group. I think there will be better solutions to this but if you can get the correct students into the correct groups in SIMS then this should still work. However I would advise against using House Groups as they're not intended for this, instead I'd recommend the "Other" group option in the extractor. The "Other" option for SIMS is user groups so feels more like what you're after. If you can get these groups correctly created and populated then displaying the certificates to the user in Frog should be a possible with a FrogCode widget.

You can check the FROG_Groups_Others report in SIMS to see what would be extracted if you were to run it.

[ADT]

3 hours ago, savillecj said:

Hi Adrian,

I've had a read through what you're trying to do, and while I don't fully understand how you're storing this data, I believe what you're trying to do is put students in to a "Gold" class if they have above 1500 points etc. You then want to display the gold certificates in Frog if they're in the "gold" group. I think there will be better solutions to this but if you can get the correct students into the correct groups in SIMS then this should still work. However I would advise against using House Groups as they're not intended for this, instead I'd recommend the "Other" group option in the extractor. The "Other" option for SIMS is user groups so feels more like what you're after. If you can get these groups correctly created and populated then displaying the certificates to the user in Frog should be a possible with a FrogCode widget.

You can check the FROG_Groups_Others report in SIMS to see what would be extracted if you were to run it.

Hi Craig...

Like I say I just thought of using the House Field because I knew it pulled that data in!!  I'll have to investigate what "Other" groups are pulled in!!

Thanks for getting back to me Craig!

[ADT]

@savillecj out of interest I know you are saying the house field is not intended for this.....  but if it’s an unused field in our SIMs...  and Frog pulls it in a way I can use without having to code a solution...  where’s the harm!!!  

Its not like it’s going to blow up if I use it that way right??

Looks like @pconkie s exporting from SIMs and some jigery pokery in a macro and reimporting it might be the easiest way to do it!!!