Detention Logging

[DSapseid]

Currently when a teacher sets a student a Detention its logged in SIMS and then in the staff room we have an A3 piece of paper for each year group where the member of staff writes up who is in detention with them that day, also means staff can check when they can give a student a detention in case they are 'fully booked'!

 

This works but isn't very 21st century!

 

One of the assistant heads pointed it out to me this morning and has asked me to have a look to see if there is a solution that we could use 'a bit like our room booking system, but with kids rather than rooms'.

 

I'm imagining a web front end hooked into a database so if they try and book a detention for a student on a day they already have one it tells them they cant.

 

Does anyone else do/have anything similar before i spend hours trying to create something with my very basic knowledge of php!!

 

Or if anyone has a better idea then i'm all ears!!

[fromtheinternet]

Perhaps this should have gone into one of the Technical forums?

 

Anyway, how's your AD set up? If you have the pupil names as attributes, you could tie something into AD. A simple PHP page with SQLite and an AD/LDAP library would work fine. I'm pretty certain it's even possible to hook into AD with MS Access - you could knock up a prototype pretty quickly that way.

[DSapseid]

Maybe it could in the technical forums but i was trying to see what everyone else did in the first instance to see if anyone knows of any software that already exists to save me reinventing the wheel!!

 

The 'Display Name' field in AD is the students full name. Yes thats what i was thinking i could do.

[fromtheinternet]

Just discovered another option when researching this out of curiosity: In your SIMS.net install folder, there's a command line app called CommandReporter.exe. You can use that to export an XML report from SIMS. Whenever someone wants to query the users in detention, you could generate the report on demand.

 

With that XML file, you could then either run it through an XSLT file to format it into something human-readable, or you could import it into PHP or another scripting language to manipulate. You wouldn't even need to worry about a database, really. Unless you have a load of staff querying it every few minutes, the overhead of generating the report should be minimal.