bantonia

Just purchased 25 A3 faculty trial licences to see if I can extend our trial period if I don't get the purchasing of the real ones sorted in time. We have a live event happening on the day of expiry so am unsure whether this means we are still licenced during that day or does it expire at midnight?

I was quoted for just the number of A3 and A5 licences we would need under our OVS agreement, not for every member of staff. Currently using trial licences on the few that need them but am now under pressure to purchase the numbers we need as the trial is about to finish.

Have an issue where the Windows 10 mail client only sends the currently edited email text and not the whole email thread. This doesn't happen with Outlook, of various varieties, and only one user is affected but that user is reluctant to use any other mail client. Any clues how to fix this without using another mail client? It was working but stopped fairly recently. Company Portal was installed to allow the Windows 10 mail client to work with 365.

Our papercut cards have a 17 digit number, does your formula work for this length?

I'm having an issue connecting to Lexia using Android on LearnPads. Currently my only solution is to take the LearnPads home, connect to Lexia and change the school settings, at this point there is a padlock at the top right of the login box which allows you to switch between HTTPS and HTTP authentication and leave them on HTTP. Once this has been done, bring the LearnPads back into school and they appear to work fine. I've tried connecting them through an unfiltered proxy at school but without success to get through this initial stage. Taking the LearnPads home removes all interference of any proxy settings.

You could use my webservice software to run reports remotely and receive the data as an XML soap message. Download from http://www.beaconhillcott.net. You do have to install Glassfish on a SIMS server or workstation and add a path in the environment variables to your SIMS .net directory. This is what I use. I know this thread is over a month old but I thought I'd add my contribution to this problem which doesn't appear to being made any easier.

If you go to http://www.beaconhillcott.net then you could download some software I wrote some time ago which will enable you to run SIMS reports remotely. It does use Glassfish though but you can get the results of the report via webservices and WSDL, this is what I use. As long as you are not bothered with the time it takes for a report to run, you will never get the same response as direct access using SQL.

All went smoothly, no hitches! Well, so far.

Well, my issue is that there are 3 of each named similar to "SIMSApplicationSetup 1.612.33.0 to 1.614.19.0 Upgrade.EXE", obviously with different upgrade versions and upgrade targets, SIMSApplicationSetup being one. SIMSApplicationSetup just upgrades the client, SIMSAMPARKSetup upgrades bits for Assessment Manager on the client and SIMSManualSetup installs the manuals to the client so those are fairly understandable. SIMSSQLApplicationSetup however does update the tools on the server so yes I agree this would need to be executed after the copy. Just talked to Capita service desk, copy the .EXE files from my trial 2012 setups directory, run SIMSSQLApplicationSetup.EXE on my live system and do the dbupgrade using the files from the randomly named folder. Not to run SIMSCentralServerSetup.EXE as it is not a new install. The patch is for the previous version so needs to be applied first. So, this is what I will be doing this evening. Thanks for the support and chat.

Similar to what I was thinking. If I copy the contents of my upgraded 2012 setups directory into my live SIMS setups directory then do a dbupgrade from the random named folders, there is a patch as well. Will that do the job? As for being frowned upon, well, that's Capita.

I've downloaded the 2013 Spring release and did an upgrade to a trial migration of SIMS to SQL 2012 and Windows 2012 without issues but at that time did not upgrade our live system. Now every time I copy the upgrade files back to our setups directory and run solus, no downloads are found, obviously, but it also deletes the files I've copied back into the setups directory and shows no upgrades available. This is using solus 2. The trial migration to 2012 is on a different server so should not have affected our live system on Windows 2003 and SQL 2008 R2. Any clues? I haven't as yet asked for the upgrade to be re-released.

Hi, I know this thread may be a bit old but I've written some software which enables reports to be run remotely. It uses a Glassfish server on a SIMS workstation or server and provides a WSDL file which can be imported into your software to create the artifacts required for the communication. The only problems so far encountered is the speed reports are run and if the size of the results generated by the report is very large. Software can be downloaded from: http://www.beaconhillcott.net Regards

All my stuff is open source. I think of it as repayment for all the other open source I use. As for my current "Learning Gateway" like software, it is currently mothballed but may be revived as and when required by my College. Anyway, apart from SIF and Moodle web services, which have been put aside for the moment, current development is towards calculating value added using an Applet. Data being extracted from SIMS via CommandReporter using SOAP calls from another server which stores the data in a MySQL intermediate database. The Applet is accessed via the same intermediate server but authentication is required from AD to gain access to that web page. The Applet uses REST calls to get its data. Communication between Applet and intermediate server is via HTTPS, no username or password being stored within the Applet or files as clear text, the username and password used to access the site is also passed using HTTPS. My mothballed "Learning Gateway" lookalike currently uses Java RMI, I will probably recode it to use SOAP to fetch the data from SIMS over HTTPS. Eventually I hope, in the future to have that data being passed using SIF messages, but that's some way off at the moment.

Thought that might be the case, the plan was to extract the data I require and save it to an external database, the only problem is if there are changes then they will only be available on the next update of the intermediate database. I did discover last night the "Data Change Tracking Management" settings in SIMS .net, but when enabled the following message began to appear in the application event log. The activated proc '[sims].[db_pia_sb_RunScheduledJob]' running on queue 'sims.sims.ScheduledJobQueue' output the following: 'Cannot execute as the database principal because the principal "SIMSScheduledTaskUser" does not exist, this type of principal cannot be impersonated, or you do not have permission.' I expect some sort of patch needs to be run as well to enable tracking of any changes, certainly the "SIMSScheduledTaskUser" does not exist.

Creating a SIMS report, if you include yourself in 3rd party reporting, shows you can extract the SIF Ref Id fields for a number of items such as student, aspect and class etc but not all entries have a value for that field. Is there a way to kick start the population of these fields? What is the criteria within SIMS .net which will add an entry into the SIF Ref Id field for let's say a student?

Yes, I saw that in his post. Glad to be of service to spot something to add to the errata, annoying I know but another pair of eyes is always useful. By the way, I went to look at the SIF UK 1.4 specification and found the WSDL for the SOAP implementation hidden away behind a username/password pair, is this going to always be the case? I have the 2.5 version, which I assume has the definitions for the US Data Objects. Regards

Cheers, I will delve into the innards to see what I can find. Regards

I think Threads should take care of that.

Thanks for the advice, as I say, I am a glutton for punishment so I do agree with you there. My point is that I wish to use GlassFish in the end to support my Agents as servlets with timing events via JMS to each of the servlets to trigger SIF messaging. I realize there will be methods to process the SIF messages within the library but I do not want to by-pass the doPost() entry points etc created by GlassFish by using a separate library, which I expect are also in there. Also there is a certain amount of satisfaction once something challenging comes together!

I like to develop my own libraries, provides a better understanding of the interfaces in use in the long term. Glutton for punishment! I did download all the files last night for open-adk-java but have not looked at them yet. Is there not a zip file? However, I was able to generate container classes directly from the 1.2 schema using JAXB in NetBeans, fairly painless in the end. Anyway, got a working ZIS now and a SIF_Ping Agent. As far as I can tell my download of OpenZIS does not force authentication, the minimum check is comparing SIF_SourceId. Most of my earlier issues stem from the Apache2 vhosts configuration and not knowing the full URL of the ZIS for the SIF_message to be sent to, very frustrating!

Ahhhhhhhhh....... One thing, looking at the OpenZIS ZIT code, it is currently forced to authenticate either by certificate or password! I'll switch that off for testing and see what happens. Also it appears the XML requires a \n character between each group of open/close tags for the PHP to explode to help out in the validation process, I'll switch that off as well.

Hi, I created a SIF_Ping message, following the information and example SIF_Message from SIF Implementation Specification (United Kingdom) 1.2 - Messaging and SIF Implementation Specification (United Kingdom) 1.2 - Architecture. I have also created an Agent entry in the OpenZIS server and have used the SIF_SourceId in the message I'm trying to test. Looking at the contents sent through wireshark, all the headers are present and correct and the XML message itself follows the pattern in the example except in three places, the Version and xmlns attributes are swapped round, there is no space in the SIF_Ping (ie ) and there is an additional Any clues would be appreciated. I'm not using any security at present, there is no data being accessed. The OpenZIS server is set to 1.2. Regards

1.2 works if you choose the single file non-annotated versions. What is the difference between the SIF_Message and DataModel schemas?

Ignore my ramblings, found a zip file! Although the URL above does not work. JAXB in NetBeans created Java SIF source code without error!

Sorry, just another little niggle. I'm trying to access the 1.4 schema on http:/specification.sifassociation.org/implementation/UK/1.4/XSD/SIF_Message.xsd but it says "The page cannot be found". I've found that NetBeans can create Java classes and artefacts through JAXB by reading the XSD schema file. Looking at the 2.5 schema, which is a US schema (I think), it almost works, there is a problem only parsing CalendarDateTime. Anyway, as the UK is currently version 1.4, where can a copy of this file be accessed apart from the above URL which does not work?