SIMs - Extract timetables in file form for use on VLE

[nicklec]

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?

[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.

[dhicks]

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.

 

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

[CyberNerd]

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

[MattMitchell]

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.