CTF File to Excel Format

[xicor]

Hi All

 

our MIS does not support the ctf file format "more info here about ctf" its an over complicated xml file that my admin team cannot possibly go through.

 

My question is, does anyone here have a conversion tool i can use for that file ? the alternative would be to custom make one using c# or something like that but that would take ages and my admin team need this asap so just seeing if anyone here has such a tool or know of one they have used before ?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

X

[andy_b]

I have to know, what on earth MIS doesn't support CTF?

 

Especially as:

 

"Statutory obligation

 

All schools maintained by a local authority in England are required when a pupil ceases to be registered at their school, and becomes a registered pupil at another school in England or Wales, to send a Common Transfer File (CTF) to the new school. Schools maintained by a local authority include all phases – for example, nursery, primary, secondary – and types of schools – for example, special schools and pupil referral units (PRUs). PRUs are legally defined as schools and so references to schools in this document should be regarded as also applying to PRUs.

 

Academies (including free schools) are also strongly encouraged to send CTFs when a pupil leaves to attend another school.

 

Where a pupil transfers to a new school in Scotland or Northern Ireland the old school in England is still required to send a CTF."

[dhicks]

the alternative would be to custom make one using c# or something like that but that would take ages and my admin team need this asap so just seeing if anyone here has such a tool or know of one they have used before ?

 

Sorry, I don't know of anything existing. It sounds like a solvable enough kind of problem - read XML data, re-write as a set of named columns with values, output as XLSX / CSV.

[andy_b]

Just opening it in Excel might make it readable enough for them?

[xicor]

Just opening it in Excel might make it readable enough for them?

 

yeah that's a good idea I'll just get them to do that, Thanks!

[xicor]

I have to know, what on earth MIS doesn't support CTF?

 

Especially as:

 

"Statutory obligation

 

All schools maintained by a local authority in England are required when a pupil ceases to be registered at their school, and becomes a registered pupil at another school in England or Wales, to send a Common Transfer File (CTF) to the new school. Schools maintained by a local authority include all phases – for example, nursery, primary, secondary – and types of schools – for example, special schools and pupil referral units (PRUs). PRUs are legally defined as schools and so references to schools in this document should be regarded as also applying to PRUs.

 

Academies (including free schools) are also strongly encouraged to send CTFs when a pupil leaves to attend another school.

 

Where a pupil transfers to a new school in Scotland or Northern Ireland the old school in England is still required to send a CTF."

 

its not a legal requirement for a private schools unless I'm mistaken ?, we use famly.co as our MIS system

[Ditto]

yeah that's a good idea I'll just get them to do that, Thanks!

You can get a lot of repeated data/lines loading into Excel.

Have you tried opening in a browser - it shows the data/structure reasonably clearly and I have done it on a small number of occasions. There is probably an open source conversion tool, but XML to tabular format doesn't work too well. Additionally, there are a lot of coded values in the CTF. Would the admin team know how to map those to the front end descriptions in your MIS. What particular items of data are you looking to extract - a targeted XML extraction may be worth considering.