SIMs - Extract timetables in file form for use on VLE

Couldn't find any uptodate info on this, apologies if there is an answer somewhere.

A Fronter visitor got it into our 'web fronter' admins head that you could make staff timetables available on Fronter just like how she could 'print to pdf' on her machine; obviously SMT and my opinion is that unless the timetables are automatically updated daily you run the risk of people having even more reason to not trust Fronter.

I only look after the curriculum side of things here so my SIMs knowledge is limited, is there a way to have SIMs save timetables to file preferably .pdf (.csv is not ideal since there is no formatting) and also automate this task?

And finally a long shot, if this was possible does anyone else know if you can have Fronter keep files uptodate automatically?

We use commandreporter to schedule data exports from SIMS, including timetable. If your report was of the XML format you could then apply a XSLT transform to it to get a formatted page.

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Originally Posted by u8dmtm

We use commandreporter to schedule data exports from SIMS, including timetable. If your report was of the XML format you could then apply a XSLT transform to it to get a formatted page.

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I've not looked at how to extract timetable information via CommandReporter yet - I don't think our timetable information gets quite as far as that. For other data we extract from SIMS I use a Python script that outputs a PDF via a PDF-writing library, or you could always use the Python Image Library (PIL) and export each timetable as a PNG file.

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David Hicks

I'd be very interested in exporting SIMS timetables to ical.... anyone know if that's possible?

It can be done - certainly on the student side I've extracted the data and generated timetables from the list of students' lessons, takes a few loops and joins and you're there! I don't think I'd want to put it on a vle if it changes a lot though.