Exporting Attendance Data from SIMS.Net

[u8dmtm]

We use scheduled commandreporter and custom reports to export timetable and student data from SIMS to be imported into other data systems.

In the same way, I would now like to create a custom report in SIMS.Net which reports AM/PM attendance marks for all students over a period of time (such as an academic year) and would like the report to export as XML, ideally in the following basic format (the xml tags are hypothetical):

<student admissionnumber=”010000”>
<attendancedata>
<attendancemark date=”05/09/2008” session=”am” mark=”/” />
<attendancemark date=”05/09/2008”/>session =”pm” mark=”\” />
<attendancemark date=”06/09/2008” session =”am” mark=”/” />
<attendancemark date=”06/09/2008” session =”pm” mark=”\” />
Etc. etc.
</attendancedata>
</student>
Etc. etc.

Is anyone aware of a way to do this?

[matt40k]

Where is this going to?

[u8dmtm]

As with the existing reports, the report would be set to export as XML onto a location on the SIMS server and would be run via commandreporter at scheduled times. A few minutes later, the resulting XML file is then read from a script which updates a SQL Server DB.

The idea will be that we use that data (in the SQL Server DB) to provide attendance data on a future parent portal (aka online reporting) and potentially on existing data systems such as progress tracking and student learner profile.

[matt40k]

Are you a company doing this? Or a school who's made a inhouse solution?

[u8dmtm]

We are a school.

[matt40k]

You can do this. Just not sure why you would want to do this? You're going to hit a lot of security\data protection stuff. What's wrong with SLG2?

[MattMitchell]

I don't have SIMS running from home at the moment (long story) so I can't look at the reporting tree, but it should be feasible.

Attendance in general is certainly possible; AM/PM split may be, or at least you could export all the attendance marks and aggregate the data outside of SIMS if need be, although that way would be fairly inefficient.

I'm exporting our attendance data as summaries, in order to import previous attendance data into assessment aspects (since you can't show what we want in a marksheet otherwise) and it can be done, one way or another.

If you're doing it for online reporting, though, there is a strong case for using something like SLG, as the authentication issues involved are solved that way. "Rolling your own" auth mechanism is doable, but to make it really robust is a whole other matter! Many LAs, and certainly Capita themselves, offer a hosted SLG service, which would allow you to show data without having to worry about the implementation side.

[u8dmtm]

What's wrong with SLG2

That's probably the wrong question since we're looking at what we want to achieve first, then what the best solution to that requirement is. We are currently gathering requirements but it is possible that SLG2 won't meet our Requirements Specification and in addition is pretty expensive. Finally, our LA appear to have put a (presumably) cheaper LA hosted SLG2 solution firmly on the back burner.

As I say, we are only at the stage of gathering requirements and assessing feasibility at this point.