[sims] Individual Reports - Find and Replace

[morrigan456]

WOW! I didnt even know this place existed! Im so pleased to have found it!

I wonder if someone could assist me? Im new to SIMS but am a software developer by trade (C# .NET).

I have been given individual reports to do for students. They have many many aspects on and are all linked to record sets. In brief what I want to do is a search and replace in word to change the record set but if i do that then the bookmarks no longer work. Anyone ever come across this?

 

Russ

[LosOjos]

WOW! I didnt even know this place existed! Im so pleased to have found it!

I wonder if someone could assist me? Im new to SIMS but am a software developer by trade (C# .NET).

I have been given individual reports to do for students. They have many many aspects on and are all linked to record sets. In brief what I want to do is a search and replace in word to change the record set but if i do that then the bookmarks no longer work. Anyone ever come across this?

 

Russ

 

Welcome to Edugeek

 

What do you mean by "bookmarks"?

 

To find and replace resultsets, make sure you are in "design mode" (on the developer tab). You'll see that all the XML tags expand, and inside those you will see something along the lines of

|^Y7 Target^|^26^|

 

The first part of that is the name of the resultset, the second part is it's external ID. You can find the ID by opening up the resultset in SIMS (Focus > Assessment > Result Sets) and scrolling to the bottom pane, properties.

 

You need to do a find and replace on both parts for it to work properly.

 

TIP: Double up on the ^ symbol when you do find and replace, it's a special character in word but doubling it acts as an escape, i.e.

Actual tag:
|^Y7 Target^|^26^|

To find using find and replace, you need to type:
|^^Y7 Target^^|^^26^^|

[LosOjos]

While I'm at it, a couple more tips:

- Compress all images in your templates; SIMS is very inefficient when generating reports and will retain all of them in memory before printing, so you want to keep file sizes as small as possible (I've pointed out that they'd be better off generating one, printing one, freeing memory rinse & repeat but to no avail)

- Don't put tags in the header/footer; for some reason, this regularly causes reports to crash or simply not pull out the data, printing the actual tag instead. Talking of which...

- Avoid headers/footers all together if you can; they greatly increase the time it takes to generate reports. If you must use headers or footers, try to get creative with table formatting first, they generate much quicker and you can quite often achieve the same results as a header/footer

[morrigan456]

Tremendous advice thanks mate, i knew there must be an easier way!! I think its worked!

[vikpaw]

The only thing i would add is that also do a find and replace on just the resultset name as a second pass. This is because it appears twice in the tag, once for display in non-developer view and once as part of the reference. If you just change the reference, it will still show visibly as the old resultset in the template, which could be confusing for you or future editors.

 

What i normally do is replace a single tag, manually, and this brings through the resultset ID you want. Then do two passes, once on the ^##^ and again on the resultset name. You should get double the number all going well. I usually take this as a sign that it's worked ok.

[Michael_]

Hi all - forgive me for going off on a tangent from the original thrust of the thread - first post and all. I wish to be able to modify some of the text or formatting as it is being generated - i.e. if a class name field is being filled in with 'R1' I want something that will automatically update to 'Reception 1' when the report prints. Possibly more important and something that I don't know a workaround for - is there a way to change formatting based upon the text that fills a field. If I have a text box and text that is too long for it reports come out truncated whereas I want the box to become larger. Is that part of the property of the text box. Can the first part be done by embedding a macro in the report that runs when it is sent to the printer or saved upon export?

 

Many Thanks,

Michael

[LosOjos]

Hi @Michael_ and

 

This can be done with macros, you need to create a Sub Routine called Document_Open in the ThisDocument module of IndRepStudentTemplate when editing an individual report's template. Any code in that routine will be run upon the document opening.

 

A word of warning though - myself and @vikpaw have come across a range of problems when doing this. I quite often have a VBA error on a core function which is actually caused by a missing reference to the SIMS VBA plugin that handles individual reports, IndRepBaseTemplate.dot. We've not found a sure fire way of solving these errors yet. Having said that, I still use them extensively as the errors only seem to happen when trying to open a saved document, not when printing from SIMS.

[vikpaw]

The text overfill is the textbox property, presumably the row in teh table has a fixed size.

 

Changing text would be a macro - @LosOjos is the most experienced in that arena, it is possible, but recently we've both had trouble getting them to work. It's hit and miss with quite unpredictable behaviour - i was looking at replacing @ with A*, and it goes funny.

 

It works as long as you manually open each document, but automating and getting it to work in bulk is tricky.

 

Another alternative approach might be to put some kind of conditional field in, and hide the cell that shows R1, make it small or colour it white, and then put the text you want in another cell. I'm not sure if this works at runtime or if you'd need to open it to trigger the action. It's bulk printing that would fail to work.

 

Is there another way for you to get the info out, perhaps use an aspect to show that info.?

[vikpaw]

LOL! Jinx - you can't speak!

[robslack]

I am trying to update a report but whenever i try to do this it just shows the tags and not the result - I put it in developer view and did find and replace using find |^^Year 13 Autumn^^|^^56^^| and replace |^^Year 12 Autumn^^|^^50^^| any ideas where this has gone wrong?

[bobsmith]

a 12 year old necro post is quite impressive!

 

that said - are you using sims hosted or you still have on-prem sims?

 

Cos on hosted they've disabled the developer tab so there's no one of editing the tags directly. What used to be a 2 minute job updating reports now takes approximately forever and introduces a lot of checking as you're effectively rebuilding from scratch.

[robslack]

31 minutes ago, bobsmith said:

a 12 year old necro post is quite impressive!

 

that said - are you using sims hosted or you still have on-prem sims?

 

Cos on hosted they've disabled the developer tab so there's no one of editing the tags directly. What used to be a 2 minute job updating reports now takes approximately forever and introduces a lot of checking as you're effectively rebuilding from scratch.

Desperate times!  We are on-prem still

[bobsmith]

in which case it should just be a matter of switching developer mode on - doing the find and replace, switching developer mode OFF again.... then saving the report.

 

when I was last using on-prem it worked beautifully for doing this.