MattMitchell

@vikpaw the idea of doing it like this is that you pull out all the relevant marksheet data at the same time as the student and course data (while those particular marksheets are still current) in order to identify the link between marksheets and subjects. In effect, you're scraping the implicit metadata from the marksheets. The main reason for doing it like this, was in order to capture the aspect setup when I didn't create it ;-) If you're reading direct from SQL, it should be easier, as in effect you're grabbing the tables and relation tables (for many-to-many joins) contained in the backend, mostly in the same kind of structure. There is the thought in the back of my mind that this might lead to a generic "capture the aspect setup in order to do meaningful analysis" application, but to make it cover all schools in a user-friendly way would make for a rather large and complex bit of coding! What's nice about it so far, is that (given a rough idea of how aspects are named in a school) it allows you to link it all together without too much human interaction, which is nice ;-) I was using things like aspectexternalids and so-on before to do the joins, but these aren't unique in the database (unless combined with the aspectsupplier field). Similarly, students aren't guaranteed to have a UPN in the database. The other reason for using SIMS's internal IDs to join on, is that these are stored in the various tables (or relation tables), so you don't have to make the backend join another table on just to output an admission number, etc, for the report.

There is a way to do this, actually... First off, though, a tip - if you want to extract lots of results in SIMS, do it through the results focus, and not the student focus. If you include studentid (via third-party reporting permissions) it'll give you a simple method to join back to a table of students, without having to include extra tables in the underlying views that support the reporting queries. You'll need several reports, and it's worth running them as a user with 3rd-party reporting permissions, in order to get at the integer primary key SIMS uses in the tables: * student focus - list of students (plus any student-specific data e.g. FSM, SEN status, etc) include StudentID * results focus - list of results. If you're in a position where you can filter these by resultset only, the report will output spectacularly fast, even for hundreds of thousands of records. include ResultID * template focus - list of templates (include TemplateID) - also show related aspects, and show AspectID for these * template focus - list of templates again, with TemplateID, and this time list the related Groups for the templates * student focus - for each student (along with their StudentId), show related classes - I tend to filter this one so that Start Date is *before* the day-after-the-reference-point, and End Date is after the day-before-the-reference-point * course core properties focus - use the course code and description, and then show related classes (again it's a good idea to filter these by end date) Between this set of tables, you have enough information to find the relations between templates->aspects, templates->groups (and therefore classes->aspects), then you can join students->classes thus getting students->class+aspects, and the use the courses->classes relation to give students->course description+aspects From there, it's a question of filtering out all the stuff you don't want, and (ideally) having some kind of consistent(ish) naming that means you can add semantics to the aspects in terms of what they actually represent (e.g. Target data, assessment grade, itnervention information, etc). Sadly, SIMS doesn't have a direct way of storing subject-based links to groups of aspects, but this method will work if you're wanting to go the route you mention. Not that I'm doing something similar here, of course ;-) Hope this helps a bit, anyway

If it's pulling out a lot of data, it might be worth running multiple reports to partition it down; for example, a student focus report could be partitioned by the year group, conduct points can be partitioned nicely by academic year, etc. One thing to bear in mind, is that some criteria will work better than others. Watch how quickly a report run in the Results focus when you filter by result set! Doing the same by result date can slow things dramatically. If you can hit on something that's likely to be filtering on an indexed field, it tends to be a hell of a lot quicker ;-) Similarly, I've found that changing the effective date on which a report runs, can have a massive impact on the time taken. Some fields, especially in student focus, can really slow things down a lot, which appears to be because of the tables that have to be joined in the underlying views on the server. Certainly, if there's a field you don't need in the report, try missing it out. Also, some sets of data can be pulled out in different ways. Assessment results are a classic example of this - a lot quicker through the results focus than the student focus.

We use Dist/Merit/Pass so that it's short enough to type and distinguishes from D in GCSE grades, but isn't as bad as "Distinction". Don't forget that staff will have to type the whole word if they're not using the "Select grade" method. To get round the other issue of existing data, you can either add the other grades into the gradeset, and then convert the old ones (if it's a feasible job), or you can add a new set of grades to the gradeset and put today as the starting date.

You can use the formula method and a separate aspect (or resultset, depending on how you've set things up), and make the formula read-only, so that staff CANNOT change the target, if that's what you want to do. I use the same technique with an EQUALS formula to copy a KS4 FFT target into a subject-specific one; one of the great things about doing this, is that you can allow staff to enter a target for students who have no Alis data, but to have whatever they enter overwritted if there's Alis data available. Best of both! Or, you can just hide the formula column, and then it will copy the data to where you want it, but not allow any entry by staff.

Unless PSHE is delivered in registration groups, in which case you could have a long registration period on those days maybe?

It's because the template was created on another sims installation - you always need to clone first if you want to view or edit it

Maybe Capita could fix the deletion routine so that it checks all the data constraints before trying to delete the contacts...

I phoned capita, asked for access and told them where I work, and they set me up - has anyone been refused when asking capita?

To be fair, Sivadam, it seems likely that you were assuming the converse when you posted that...

Good, hyperlinked documentation for SIMS would be a good thing - at the moment the info available is fairly poor, and too task-focused, centred around the interface rather than around the purpose of the task.

SupportNet is a very useful resource, and often has a solution to a problem. Sivadam - what you need to remember is that a lot of people nowadays are used to resolve a software issue by searching google for the problem, as *most* major software is discussed heavily on the internet, and therefore a solution is normally easy to find in this way. Things fall down a little with SIMS, as the information on SupportNet is only accessible to users who have an account, and therefore it doesn't come up in a search engine. Edugeek's content *is* indexed by Google, and if you search the internet for problems with SIMS, Edugeek is the site that comes up in the results, not SupportNet. That said, SupportNet is (often and usually) the best place to find an answer: the site allows users to leverage the expertise of SIMS users across the country, including many expert users who simply do not use sites like Edugeek. It's just that unless you already know about the site, and know how to use it, you'll never come across it as google can't find it. Maybe the solution is to allow partial indexing by google, so that users can find the relevant pages, and then log in to view? There are issues though - there are a lot of problems, and solutions, that I would not feel comfortable posting on a public site, and the benefit of SupportNet is that it *isn't* visible to the entire world! A tricky problem to resolve...

Another win for supportnet! Joking aside, I'd recommend that you use one aspect per subject for each type of information, e.g. "subject internal exam", "ks3 target", etc, as this will make creating and changing your marksheets easier, and then use resultsets to "tag" the info - think web2.0, except each piece of info can only have one tag...

Windows logs reboots in the event log - maybe reading that to check would do what you want...

It's only annoying when you log a call detailing the steps you've taken, and still get asked if you've tried them...

Maybe a meta-moderation forum would be a more appropriate setting for this?

Sounds interesting, but I'm not convinced that commandreporter would scale well to a few hundred parents accessing the site during period one registration!

Ironically, there's a sims data manager job going where you live, in Sandwell!

Assessment display works well, it's just not fantastically pretty and you need to look at your resultset names and grade descriptions carefully

You might find it works if you don't include as many students in the ctf - they're big files and exporting everything in one file can fail. Also, you may not need to include all student data in the file - unticking the relevant boxes when producing the ctf may help. If it still fails, even with just one student, it's probably a big in sims or corruption on your server! Have a word with support as there are things to try (detach db, etc)

It'll be interesting to see the changes in slg, certainly

If you're not buying in to an online reporting solution (slg, insight, muffins at school, etc) another way would be to publish assessment individual reports or similar through a vle - that gives the info to students on a platform they already use.

SLG will let you write session and lesson attendance marks, and use assessment manager and profiles. Behaviour is planned but not implemented yet (my guess is early 2011 but you never know). Assuming the schools are both secondaries with plenty of staff, heavy use with slg could be slow, especially if lesson changeovers are at the same time at both sites. Slg could be faster if it's self-hosted at one site and you can access there from the internal side to avoid hammering your Internet connection, but then you have the issue of maintaining a sharepoint server and the network security in-house, which would effectively cost maybe 20-30k a year for a suitably-qualified staff member plus hardare costs, etc. Another way would be to use partnership exchange with all students on roll at your main site, and it would then pick up your assessment and attendance data from the other site daily (more frequently if your link can handle it). It won't pick up behaviour but it would allow staff to use lesson monitor. Again, if your LA aren't providing a partnership exchange ZIS then staffing and maintenance could cost a bit... Unless you have students being timetabled to have lessons on both sites, I think px would be more workable as it would allow you to return census data etc correctly, and you would avoid a lot of the network traffic issues. It's not a coincidence that our LA is rolling out SLG and a county-wide 100Mbit wan at the same time! Multiple remote access isn't really feasible; if you had a dedicated point-to-point leased line for sims access only, that might work, but you'd need to talk to capita about having client software upgrades sourcing from non-default locations to avoid software upgrades killing your system. At the moment, you can't import behaviour data from one site to another in sims, but there may be a solution for this on the market in a year or so ;-)

I'm with sivadam on this - one of the major benefits is the way sims shows you the photo for each student as you enter their mark.

Great! And yet they're still left as active on the system! And people vote for them and aren't directed to help indicating how to do what they want!