[bromcom] Splitting Documents

[elJukes]

Hi

 

Every year our Secondary school produces written reports in the form of A5 booklets. We used to do this in SIMS via profiles which collated the reports and produced one document per person. In the last year we moved to Bromcom and found the process of collecting the written report information rather straightforward, however we ran into an issue when we tried to print the reports.

 

Instead of producing a document per student, the MIS produces a single document containing all of the reports for the students we've asked for. The document does collate one report after the other so students pages aren't mixed up. Initially we considered trying to programme the printer to collate every X pages into a booklet, but the variety of needs and abilities at the school meant some students took a different number of subjects making their reports different lengths.

 

We also considered running the collate routine for each student individually however that was considered to be too time consuming. In the end we developed a different solution.

 

Cobbling together code snippets and help guides from the internet we managed to build two macros for Word. The first looked for a tag which we've hidden at the top of each students report and would split everything from that tag to the next into a separate document.

 

The second macro overcomes a limitation with Windows which only allows somewhere in the region of 15 documents to be batch printed at a time. Using the second macro we have been able to send 200 odd word documents to the printer at once.

 

In case anyone else is looking to do some batch printing from Bromcom like us, I thought I'd share the macro code here. I make no claim on these, they are stitched together from a number of websites (too many to remember unfortunately).

 

To use the splitter include at the top of your document and be sure to check the end of the last document split out - for some reason it appears to sometimes add the tag on to the end of the last page of that final document.

 

 

Hope it helps

 

ReportingTools.txt

Edited February 20, 2019 by elJukes
Added Prefix

[DODICT]

can this not be achieved using the advanced report writer - ? I dont miss much about progresso but its SSRS integration meant you could always get what you wanted on a page pretty much as you wanted it. When I had a good look at the advanced reporting tool I felt it could do most of what SSRS could . .

 

There is also a nice tool called ASAP tools that easily creates a file per tab in excel - I often find you MS exports also allow you to export to excel and get a tab per entity and with ASAP tools your then a click away from splitting that document up.

 

I'll be migrating two schools to BROMCOM soon so interested if this 'hack' is essential.

 

thanks.

[Arthur]

The second macro overcomes a limitation with Windows which only allows somewhere in the region of 15 documents to be batch printed at a time.

It's possible to increase the number of files that can be printed through File Explorer by modifying the following registry setting...

 

• www.thewindowsclub.com/print-more-than-15-files-windows
  
• https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2022295/context-menus-are-shortened-when-more-than-15-files-are-selected
  

[elJukes]

Hi DODICT

When working with single page reports everything works fine, you get a single document with everyone's data in with a page per student. I've not had much cause to use the advanced reporting tool so don't know if that would work, but for making multi-page documents of varying length per student this was how we do it.

Best of luck with the migration. If you want to talk a bit about it feel free to drop me a DM.

 

Hi Arthur

 

Thanks for that, I tried changing those before but it didn't seem to work. Perhaps I've missed a step, will have another look soon. Thanks!

Edited February 20, 2019 by elJukes

[ajp233]

Are you doing this via a WebMerge report in Bromcom? If so then you should be able to get one document per student by selecting Copy to DMS and Multiple Documents

[elJukes]

Hi ajp233

 

Thanks for your reply. We've had the system split documents out to the DMS before, our problem was then downloading them all to print en mass. Do you know how we can download a year groups worth of documents at once from the DMS?

[ajp233]

When you process the reports it should automatically download a PDF that you can print at the same time that it uploads to the DMS

[elJukes]

Hi ajp233

 

Yes we got the PDF as well, but the PDF is one file with everyone's report in one after the other. I can't then print those as individual booklets per student.

[Bromcom_Support]

Hi elJukes

 

Documents are stored individually for the students. What you need is to be able to export these reports as individual documents so you can do your printing. What you could do is go to 'My Documents', use the filters to find the reports you want and select them. You can then use the 'Send Document' option and send them to your email address. You will then have the individual reports. Not ideal but this may work for you. Feel free to raise a development idea on the support site for this.

[vikpaw]

I recently needed to do this for reports out of iSAMS.

 

Couldn’t find a bulk way to export all assessment reports as separate docs but they can be a single pdf. Generally it’s the same number of pages but randomly can be longer.

 

Eventually came across this program called Sejda PDF editor, which lets you split based on text. Wildcard naming using split text. So if there is a common header eg “booklet for student ” you can use that to split and the xyz as the filename.

 

It has a limited free version so can be tested with up to 50 docs.

 

There were many other paid for programs, some even looked ok, but this seemed the best option.

[noelmm]

If I'm reading this correctly wouldn't the simplest thing be to use the WebMerge option and ensure the word template you're using has a blank page at the end. Doing this would allow you to print off any of the pages required or you could print them all and the you can split the students individual reports into envelopes (I'm assuming this is to send them home).

[DODICT]

@vikpaw with SSRS if you export your docs to excel you can get a tab per student - a super free tool called ASAP tools (Essentially resource for any data role in schools) can then output each tab to a file and even picks up the tab name which you can define in SSRS. This is how we managed to get our MFDs to booklet and staple reports as it needed them to be separate docs.

[vikpaw]

@DODICT would this be possible with iSAMS? I don't use it, was just advising the school. I don't think they have SSRS access, just the app report engine.

[DODICT]

@DODICT would this be possible with iSAMS? I don't use it, was just advising the school. I don't think they have SSRS access, just the app report engine.

 

definitely possible with SSRS - apologies I thought ISAMS provided SSRS reporting for all but if the school arent using it then its probably going to be a big jump . . .