[sims] Report for historic attendance figures

[sparkeh]

I am trying to write a report that will show pupil attendance figures on a certain date.

 

If I use the field '%Present + AEA' and enable supplying an effective data at runtime, it appears to always return the pupils' latest attendance figures no matter what date is supplied. If I put in any date from a previous academic year it appears to return their ending % figure.

 

I can't see any other field that would seem to do the job so does anyone know how to write this report?

 

TIA.

[LosOjos]

I am trying to write a report that will show pupil attendance figures on a certain date.

 

If I use the field '%Present + AEA' and enable supplying an effective data at runtime, it appears to always return the pupils' latest attendance figures no matter what date is supplied. If I put in any date from a previous academic year it appears to return their ending % figure.

 

I can't see any other field that would seem to do the job so does anyone know how to write this report?

 

TIA.

 

How are you with macros?

 

SIMS will only give academic year summary figures for attendance, to get more specific you'll need to dump the data out of SIMS (i.e. write a report that exports all attendance marks, filtered by date range) then analyse the data yourself in Excel. The reason I ask about macros is because if it's something that will need doing regularly, you'll be better off spending the time to develop something now so you're not asked to churn through the data manually every day/week/term

[sparkeh]

How are you with macros?

 

SIMS will only give academic year summary figures for attendance, to get more specific you'll need to dump the data out of SIMS (i.e. write a report that exports all attendance marks, filtered by date range) then analyse the data yourself in Excel. The reason I ask about macros is because if it's something that will need doing regularly, you'll be better off spending the time to develop something now so you're not asked to churn through the data manually every day/week/term

Arrrgggghhh! >:-$

 

Ok thanks

Yeah I can write some code to do that, I have coded the next part which does stuff with the attendance figures once they have been outputted.

 

Never easy it it?

[LosOjos]

Never easy it it?

 

Not where SIMS reports are concerned! (Not once you try to move beyond basic lists or mail merges anyway)

[vikpaw]

At least the macro can live in the report def and run automagically.

Just out of interest, if you run the display marks routine from lesson monitor and tell it a certain date are the summaries adjusted to that date. I'm sure that's what we used to do. Only snag is you can't schedule them to run, but it did output XML which is useful for some things.

[sparkeh]

At least the macro can live in the report def and run automagically.

Oh? How do you do that?

Just out of interest, if you run the display marks routine from lesson monitor

Primary here, no lesson monitor.

[vikpaw]

Oh? How do you do that?

 

Primary here, no lesson monitor.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/38519-edit-excel-output.html#post359319 for the guide, some other threads have discussed it and potential issues or improvements - @LosOjos is darn good in that area.

 

Try Focus | Attendance | Display Marks because i think it's a core report. The LM licence changes a few menu titles so my reference might be wrong.

[sparkeh]

Ok thanks everyone, its not as onerous as I first thought. I can just use the AM/PM marks report for the dates required and alter my current spreadsheet to calculate the overall attendance, then it can carry on its magic.

 

Would be nice to have a report that just gave you the overall attendance between dates.

[Steven_Cleaver]

One of the advantages of PAR's you can run various Attendance and other reports based on various dates you specify or even switch to previous year and specify dates in that year .

[sparkeh]

One of the advantages of PAR's you can run various Attendance and other reports based on various dates you specify or even switch to previous year and specify dates in that year .

[PhilNeal]

You can do all sorts of date related queries on attendance etc in SIMS including looking at prior years. The home page widgets can be tailored to report on house, reg or year and to report on various periods. SIMS can even spot attendance absence patterns with pupils.

[sparkeh]

Thanks @PhilNeal

Perhaps I am doing this wrong, but all I need is a report that gives a whole school roll with individual pupil overall attendance for that year, up to a given date, output to Excel.

Can I do this without extra scripting outside of Sims?

[CAM]

Agreed, one of the most common requests I get is for a report on attendance and behaviour over a specific date range and there is no way I know of in SIMS to do this via the Reporting tool without faffing around with dumped marks in Excel. If we could allow Reporting to show us data such as the Attendance% field or Behaviour Points total for a specific period instead of the current "on this Effective Date" system that would be great.

[PhilNeal]

I'll get an expert to look at this and come back to you.

[PhilNeal]

This is what I have so far:

 

Rather than trying to retrieve this data from the reporting dictionary, it is possible to run one of the built in Attendance reports such as the Percentage Attendance Report. From this you can choose your own date ranges, and then save the output as raw XML, which can then be opened and modified in Excel to then run your macros on.

[LosOjos]

This is what I have so far:

 

Rather than trying to retrieve this data from the reporting dictionary, it is possible to run one of the built in Attendance reports such as the Percentage Attendance Report. From this you can choose your own date ranges, and then save the output as raw XML, which can then be opened and modified in Excel to then run your macros on.

 

Problem with that though is no CommandReporter for automation and extra steps for users to get the result they need, you'd have to provide them with an Excel template or something to load the XML in to so that it could churn through it... I can just imagine the response I'd get trying to tell some of our teachers to do that!

[sparkeh]

This is what I have so far:

Rather than trying to retrieve this data from the reporting dictionary, it is possible to run one of the built in Attendance reports such as the Percentage Attendance Report. From this you can choose your own date ranges, and then save the output as raw XML, which can then be opened and modified in Excel to then run your macros on.

Thanks @PhilNeal

This is pretty much what I have done now. So, I am using the AM/PM built in report for the dates required, dumping to xml then have some VBA code in our spreadsheet to reverse the name order (to match the name order used by the Attendance Officer in her spreadsheet) and workout the overall attendance %, then I can run the VBA that I had written to do all the stuff that the attendance officer needs.

 

It appears to me that this is (possibly) needlessly complicated. The reason I got involved in this was our Attendance Officer couldn't work out how to get over attendance % for a given range out of Sims and into her spreadsheet. So some observations from this experience:

• Unless I have missed something (and as indicated in a previous post) there is no built in report that can give overall attendance % for a given range. It would be useful to either have an overall % at the end of the AM/PM report or have a separate report showing this.
  
• It would be even better if we could have access to the more than just current attendance % in the reporting dictionary; if we had access to historic marks then (I think) it wouldn't be that difficult to build a report that filters marks between certain dates.
  

[vikpaw]

The report probably runs a stored procedure which could be scheduled and possibly give the data in a more user friendly format. But that's a hack

[CAM]

One of the biggest problems I had was a lot of templates just went bang one day and disappeared, never got to the bottom of it. I haven't been able to recover them and subsequently stopped using macros and templates full stop.