[sims] Report to extract student / staff timetables via CommandReporter

[Meldrew]

Hi,

 

As a bit of background, I am writing an app at the moment for students, staff and parents to use as a communication tool with school. Its based around homework really, but with other facilities built in too.

 

One of these other facilities is the ability for students and parents to see the students timetable. The way I've tried to do this is to create a report in SIMS giving students, their classes, when these classes are timetabled and which which teacher. I then use SIMS CommandReporter to extract this data and import into a database that I can then query to reproduce a timetable for a student.

 

This looked like it was working fine, but during trials with students, a few students reported that their timetable was incorrect in the app. Upon investigation the results showed that the SIMS report included some students apparently being taught 2 lessons at the same time.

 

Speaking to the timetable person here, (my knowledge of how to use SIMS is very patchy I should admit) this is correct and in SIMS itself, they have to tick a box to say which of the multiple classes the student actually attends (I think in this particular case, the student was in an intervention class, so rather than attending mainstream English, they attend the intervention class). I think this tickbox was called 'assigning' the class to the student. I went back to the report fields available and unfortunately there isn't an 'assigned' field that I could pick up and use to exclude classes that they don't actually attend.

 

Its a bit of a long shot, but I wondered if anyone knew where to pick up this attribute and/or another way to automatically export student timetables from SIMS such that this could them be imported into a database.

 

Many thanks,

 

Meldrew.

[Schoolcomms]

I am pretty sure we have solved this in the display of timetables in our app. But we use the APIs to access SIMS rather than command reporter.

 

You are welcome to have a go with our app if you like, give the team a call and they will set you up with a free trial (in fact I see you are in Cornwall (we are too) so I am sure they would happily come out to see you)