Sims .Net Lesson Monitor Reports

[gohlj]

Hi

 

I am trying to produce a report in Sims .Net which can obtain lesson attendance marks (not just marks for sessions, am/pm) for every student between two dates. I need to get this report with the command line reporter tool.

 

I am having a bit of a dilemma here because I am able to manually produce the lesson monitor report (reports > lesson monitor > full register report) but have no idea how to do this using the CLR (perhaps a secret report name), Our local education authority support do not know either. If this is possible I also need to be able to specify the from and to-date at the command line.

 

If I try to create a report using the design report tool in .Net I cant seem to be able to retrieve data containing marks for lessons or be able to filter between dates etc, it all seems a bit flaky.

 

Hope somebody out there can help me!

 

James

[LosOjos]

I've done a lot of custom reporting in SIMS.net and as far as I can tell, running a report between certain dates is impossible. You can run a report and set the active date, but not an 'active between' date.

 

Also, there are no 'secret' reports in CLR, you can only run the reports available to you in SIMS .net

 

If you need help defining parameters when running reports from CLR, add the '/PARAMDEF' tag to your call and the output XML will be the parameter definition file you need to pass to CLR to set the report parameters

[vikpaw]

not used the CLR but i'd have thought writing your own report would be possible in .net but they can go awry quickly.

 

i know active date is only a single date but surely that's by design. you can do a between filter on the 'mark date' i'm sure we've done it here before for am reg marks.

 

as an aside, i remember it's possible to schedule reports to run in SIMS, would that give you access to the LM reports? They are for some reason hidden away to the side such that you cant even add them to favorites, so that could be a workaround...

 

i'd have a look at one of my attendance reports but my update to sims went a bit funny last night so no time atm.

[Sivadam]

Why not create the Report via Reports, Lesson Monitor, Letters, Print letters.

These at set up via Tools, Setups, Attendance Setup, Letter definition.

You can set up whatever report that you want to via this route - it does not have to be a letter. We have loads of pre-defined reports in this section - both for sessions and for lessons. It may or may not be able to pick up the data you want (it does not do a Reg Cert type report).

 

Josh - there are many examples where you can do reports across date ranges, from many different parts of SIMS. The above is just one example.

Edited February 25, 2010 by Sivadam

[LosOjos]

Why not create the Report via Reports, Lesson Monitor, Letters, Print letters.

You can set up whatever report that you want to via this route - it does not have to be a letter. We have loads of pre-defined reports in this section - both for sessions and for lessons.

 

Josh - there are many examples where you can do reports across date ranges, from many different parts of SIMS. The above is just one example.

 

I never thought of using customised letters, thanks for that

[LosOjos]

Have a look at the attached, see if that does what you want.

 

Import the report in to SIMS .net (you can then also edit it if you want any more info in it) then when you run it from CLR, use the paramdef.xml file to set parameters.

 

I'm assuming you know how to do this, but if you don't then I'll happily explain it all in more detail

Lesson Attendance Between Two Dates.zip

[gohlj]

Have a look at the attached, see if that does what you want.

 

Import the report in to SIMS .net (you can then also edit it if you want any more info in it) then when you run it from CLR, use the paramdef.xml file to set parameters.

 

I'm assuming you know how to do this, but if you don't then I'll happily explain it all in more detail

Hi,

 

Sorry for my delay in getting back to you, I have imported the report but cannot find it to run

 

James

[LosOjos]

Hi,

 

Sorry for my delay in getting back to you, I have imported the report but cannot find it to run

 

James

 

It should be in "Focus > Student > Lesson Attendance Between Two Dates", is it not?

[vikpaw]

i swear i used to be able to sort the list of reports by clicking on the headings, i must have been dreaming, as it doesn't work now.

[gohlj]

It should be in "Focus > Student > Lesson Attendance Between Two Dates", is it not?

Josh,

 

This is exactly what I need , but how do I modify the report from here? I'd like to include period name and output to XML.

 

James

[LosOjos]

Josh,

 

This is exactly what I need , but how do I modify the report from here? I'd like to include period name and output to XML.

 

James

 

To add in Periods is a bit tricky, the whole report would have to be rewritten to change the focus point I think...

 

As for the XML output, open the report in "Design Report", get to the "Default Output" options, change type to text and you'll see options for "XML" and "XML with schema" (use whichever you want to, it's good to have schema for external app compatibility but if it's going in to your own app it doesn't matter as much). Having said that, I think just specifying the file name with ".xml" extension from CLR will make it export as XML anyway.

 

Let me know if you need the periods included and I'll write you a new report.

[gohlj]

Ok come to think of it periods aren't really important, as long as I can tell between session marks and lesson marks, this report doesn't seem to include session marks anyway.

 

When specifying the .xml in the output arg in CLR it appears to only produce the schema version of the xml report.

 

It looks like I am actually getting somewhere now, thank you so much you are a life saver! I'd come to far to give up, I'd written my own XML parser in php; capable of parsing huge files (we're talking gigabytes) in order import data from these reports into a mysql database.

 

My next step is to be able to produce a fresh paramdef.xml file using php to define the between dates. How did you produce this paramdel.xml file?

 

James

[LosOjos]

My next step is to be able to produce a fresh paramdef.xml file using php to define the between dates. How did you produce this paramdel.xml file?

 

Happy to help James

 

To create a Paramdef, run the report from CLR but add the tag "/PARAMDEF", that will make the output file you specify the Paramdef file (in XML). You can ignore the schema and it won't do any harm, that's what I do to reduce down my scripts a bit.

 

I don't know how you were planning to create the Paramdef file on the fly, but I found the easiest way was to start a textstream (I'm talking VBA but the idea's the same in any language) and write out the lot to a text file (with .xml extension). This seemed much easier to me than working with XML libraries.

[gohlj]

Happy to help James

 

To create a Paramdef, run the report from CLR but add the tag "/PARAMDEF", that will make the output file you specify the Paramdef file (in XML). You can ignore the schema and it won't do any harm, that's what I do to reduce down my scripts a bit.

 

I don't know how you were planning to create the Paramdef file on the fly, but I found the easiest way was to start a textstream (I'm talking VBA but the idea's the same in any language) and write out the lot to a text file (with .xml extension). This seemed much easier to me than working with XML libraries.

Thank you once again!,

 

The plan is to experiment with php producing a minimalist paramdef.xml file on the fly so I can specify the dates from the date which data was last synchronised to the current date.

[simpsonj]

Why not create the Report via Reports, Lesson Monitor, Letters, Print letters.

These at set up via Tools, Setups, Attendance Setup, Letter definition.

You can set up whatever report that you want to via this route - it does not have to be a letter. We have loads of pre-defined reports in this section - both for sessions and for lessons. It may or may not be able to pick up the data you want (it does not do a Reg Cert type report).

 

Josh - there are many examples where you can do reports across date ranges, from many different parts of SIMS. The above is just one example.

 

I realise this is a massive bit of necro raising, but how is something so useful buried so deep in SIMS?! And with such a convoluted way of getting to it.

 

Wish I'd seen this thread years ago, would have saved me (and our Attendance Manager) so much time...

[Sivadam]

This is a blast from the past. I have been retired 8 years now. I used to be a regular on here but I often used to refer people to SupportNet where I posted most of my help messages.