cmis attendance extraction

[master]

ok so i have decided to be nice .... well depending on how complecated this becomes

 

The PROBLEM:

 

the head of nursery unit spends ages each day working out the nursery dinner numbers manually from paper registers

this then has to be split into the different meal types (e.g. halal, vegitarian, vegan, no dairy, and all the different variations)

i am feeling sorry for her as this could all be done oh so much easier by some software or other ... or so i think

problem is i cant find anything that will do this at all so i am thinking of something in excell a simple spreadsheet thing to do the dinner numbers automatically and split them into the different meal types

i feel confident that this will be quite simple and work quite well BUT inputting the attendance of the nursery children on the spreadsheet after it has all been sent to CMIS via ePortal would kinda invalidate the point of the whole thing

 

The QUESTION:

 

is there a simple script i can make and put on my admin server that will export a file containing the nursery attendance for 'today' ?

 

(then i can automate it as a scheduled task run it daily after the registers close and connect my spreadsheet up to the data via a secure share and have the dinner numbers and meal variations all calculated automatically by the spreadsheet)

i did try to look on here first but all i have found is in this post :

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7748

the reference to "a command-line report export utility" but i have never done anything like this before and dont like to get too involved with cmis so have no idea what this tool is where to find it how to work it or anything

 

Any pointers at all would be extreemly usefull

 

thanks in advance

[Tonyoung]

@master - I think the "a command-line report export utility" works with SIMS and not CMIS.

[kylewilliamson]

You should be able to talk to the database directly - failing that, can't you teach how to use cmis admin?

 

Kyle

[kylewilliamson]

To add to that, you should be able to add an extra field onto the CMIS student dialog that allows you to enter "special dietary requirements" or similar - it should then be possible to run an access app or indeed excel (excel supports sql, i seem to remember!) spreadsheet to pick out the data you want.

 

Kyle

[AndyCope]

Why do you want to export this data?

 

Surely a printed report directly from CMIS is whats required, and shouldnt be difficult to set-up from the comments made above.

[maniac]

The reporting interface on CMIS will allow you to build a report to accomplish this quite easily, as it allows you to query literally any part of the database. However this would need to be run manually every morning, but would only take a minute of someones time once the report has been written.

 

There is no 'simple' way of reading directly from the CMIS database without using CMIS. The backend of it is a complete muddle of tables that all relate to each other in certain ways. It takes a long time to find your way round them, and any script or program would need to be custom written specifically for that database and of course updated as and when they make changes to it. It took me two days of solid work just to get full names, yeargroups, student IDs and group memberships out of the database using PHP.

 

Mike.