[sims] Missing Marks Report -> Report Template

[GeorgeVince]

Good Afternoon All,

 

Firstly let me explain the situation I'm in. I'm responsible for generating reports for pupils in the school and this involves checking all teachers have entered data into aspects.

My line manager insisted that each Marksheet had to be checked manually and could not be automated, this meant opening up and checking every single student in every single marksheet had data inputted... wow. This was NOT a fun activity.

I insisted there must be a more efficient way to achieve this, and came up with the solution of using the Missing Marks Report in SIMS. (Reports -> Assessment -> Missing Marks Report). Unfortunately it duplicated results for every Supervisor of the marksheets, a simple problem that could be fixed by pulling data from SIMS on each main supervisor and using a vlookup to match the template with the correct supervisor. Data exported to a pivot table and can be used to dig through data.

Wayhay! The Process of checking reports done in 10 minutes instead of 2 days!!

 

I'm looking for a way to automate the process using CommandRreporter and a report definition.

Does anyone have a report definition or an idea how I could emulate the missing marks report using the report designer?

[jdjwright]

Did you ever get an answer to this? I'm trying to automate email reminders for our staff and can't seem to get a simple report on SIMS!

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

It is possible to do as we offer this as a service to the schools we support, but to make it maintainable by the school it needs tailoring to the assessment aspects each school use (as they are usually all different unless you are dealing with MATs etc.). The way I do it is with a config file containing the aspect and result set combinations required for the current assessment period, then a PowerShell script that iterates over each line in the config file looking for missing marks by running CommandReporter with dynamic parameters, the script then collates the results of missing marks together for each staff member and emails them with a summary (i.e. in has assessment results missing, please open marksheet and fill these in.

[RootsSchImp]

Hi George,

 

Here's a couple of ideas that might help. In a sims report if you add a subreport with no fields on it will give you a count - so if you make the focus of your report classes you can then have a subreport which counts the students of the class (you'll need to filter it to show only current class members). I think you'll need a different report (with a focus on marksheet maybe) to give you a count of assessment results (of a particular aspect and resultset) of each class. You then need a bit of Excel nous (which it sounds like you have) to compare number of students to number of results. If you have your sims reports output to CSVs you could link them to a third spreadsheet with power query and look at the differences there.

[Jahir]

It is possible to do as we offer this as a service to the schools we support, but to make it maintainable by the school it needs tailoring to the assessment aspects each school use (as they are usually all different unless you are dealing with MATs etc.). The way I do it is with a config file containing the aspect and result set combinations required for the current assessment period, then a PowerShell script that iterates over each line in the config file looking for missing marks by running CommandReporter with dynamic parameters, the script then collates the results of missing marks together for each staff member and emails them with a summary (i.e. in has assessment results missing, please open marksheet and fill these in.

 

This sounds like exactly what I need to do. Do you have any guidance or documents on how I can set this up?

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

Hi Jahir,

As It's part of a wider service that we offer our supported schools it's built in to other scripts and processes and isn't a standalone routine that we can just extract, and the documentation is only aimed at schools using our scripts so wouldn't be much help in writing the scripts from scratch.

To give you a little more detail we have a report that output as xml through CommandReporter, that outputs student name and class. This has a run time parameters of: course name, today's date and year group (for the main filter to just retrieve those students that we are expecting a result for), then aspect and result set (with an additional filter of Result is null) in the assessment subreport. We then use a config file to specify all the courses we are expecting, and the aspect/result set combinations we want to check for each course then use a Powershell script to iterate over all the combinations calling the report via CommandReporter. There is then a second report with a class focus which returns each class's main teacher, the class name and their email address that I then use PowerShell to match the results from each running of the first report with the email fromt he second and then use the built in Powershell commandlets to send an email using one of the school's Office 365 accounts.