[sims] CommandReporter param files and parameter IDs

[LosOjos]

@iceman - do you tend to use attendance mark date "from" and "to" for your extraction? I'm trying to do that but am getting nowhere; SIMS ignores my parameters and just returns the ones I "hard coded" in to the report so I could et the paramdef...

[iceman]

@iceman - do you tend to use attendance mark date "from" and "to" for your extraction? I'm trying to do that but am getting nowhere; SIMS ignores my parameters and just returns the ones I "hard coded" in to the report so I could et the paramdef...

 

The fields I use are the adno and upn and then a sub report of the various bits of attendance marks that I want, filtered to where 'Mark Date is after ...' AND 'Mark Date is Before...' with a user defined prompt string for both (with no spaces in them! - Sims is rather notorious for producing field names and parameters containing characters not easily used by other database systems).

 

The report is designed with sensible, but arbitrary, dates hard coded in it for the before and after dates (If I remember correctly the dates I use are after 15th August 2009 and before 29th July 2010.) On its own, if it were to be run prior to july 2010 that would produce loads of attendance marks of '-' meaning they were missing because they were in the future.

 

But as the report also has 'prompt at runtime' checked, if you run it directly from sims that's exactly what it will do and it will ask for the two parameters of before and after dates (so you can test it).

However if you run it via CR it will expect the parameters to come from a params file or else directly via an XML string, which is what I give it.

 

When my attendance system refreshes its data it first generates the two dates it wants ie for 'after' it uses the day before the first day of the current academic year and for 'before' is uses the date of the Saturday of the last week to contain a teaching day before the current date, taking into account holidays. It then passes those dates to command reporter as the parameters. That way I only get attendance marks in the range I need.