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June 30, 2006

Email Address by Major/Term web app, SZRACAD

I created a new web app on Aero this week that will display students email addresses based on their major code for a given term. A link is posted out on the facultyinfo website for it.

I'm working on a new job submission called SZRACAD that will display a students current academic standing by crn/term for the advising office. Once it's finished, it should save them many hours from looking at each individual student per course in Banner.

Posted by soukupm at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)

Weekly Report: Scarf, banner 7.3 testing, pfaids patch

This week I fixed some of the remaining problems with the scarf report. There was a bug in the high school subject code that was preventing the records from printing out but I eventually figured it out and fixed it. One of the tricky parts about the scarf script is that it uses many other packages so you kind of have to hunt around each file to find what your looking for. Here's a list of the files that it uses:
WOU_Student.pm
WOU_Admit.pm
WOU_Person.pm
WOU_AR.pm
WOU_Finaid.pm
WOU_Schedule.pm
WOU_SIS_Util.pm
WOU_Util.pm
WOU_Scarf.pm

WOU_Student is the largest of the files and a lot of our reports written in perl use this file. So one must edit this file cautiously or risk breaking many applications. The same could be said about the other packages. I created the WOU_Scarf package so that I can make any changes and add new functions when necessary instead of modifying the other packages.

I've been continuing with testing banner 7.3 this week. I just finished up with dropping courses via the web to test fee assessment and it all worked fine. I also tested the student unofficial transcripts and the faculty unofficial transcripts and they both worked fine ( with our custom mods in place too). I tested the scarf report and it worked fine also.

Today I updated powerfaids to version 11.2C for Financial Aid and ran a custom script from powerfaids to fix a few records that had deleted POEs from a student's record.

Posted by soukupm at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2006

Weekly Report: Grades, SOAR

This week I ran the entire grading process by myself (and I didn't break anything). I have a better idea about what all needs to be done in case I need to do it in the future.

Also this week I got all the necessary (behind the scenes) tasks done for SOAR #1. Registration is setup, pin list, id cards, computers setup, open section list report moved to banner web and modified slightly, cleared 'AR' holds, and much more to do on saturday.

Posted by soukupm at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

Fix Check Script, Health Insurance procedure

I wrote a perl script that will clean up the extra form feeds in case someone should forget to put in a specific printer when printing checks. The script is called fix_check.pl and it's in my developer directory.
perl fix_check.pl

I changed the Health Insurance procedure this week because cashiers needs to send the same information for international students as it does for regular students. I added a new parameter to the procedure called p_report_type. Use 'N' for normal report and 'I' for international.
wou_misc.p_health_insurance (p_term, p_term_start,p_term_end, p_report_type)

Posted by soukupm at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2006

NCAA Report

I found out about the missing sgrsprt data and it seems that the data was never entered into banner at all. All the data was saved into individual spreadsheets by each sport. Since we were down to the last few days to report and needed that data, I took all the information from each spreadsheet and loaded it into banner by doing some creative copy and pasting in excel and created import statements with the data. It still took a while to do it but at least that data is now in Banner.
In the process of getting the data ready for the report, I needed to create a few more quick functions to get some extra data. Here's the new functions added to wou_misc:
f_get_ethnicity(pidm) - returns ethnicity code.
f_get_degree_year(pidm,level) - returns term code when student got a degree.
f_get_tr_coll(pidm,term) - returns pipe seperated list of colleges the student attended and the highest degree offered at that institution.

Posted by soukupm at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2006

Weekly Report: Powerfaids 11.2N, Scarf, etc

Some of the things I did this week (and last friday too):

I upgraded financial aid's powerfaids database to version 11.2N on friday. The upgrade went fine with no problems. Today I loaded the 11.2NA patch that fixes a few problems in 11.2.

Financial aid will need a modification to their admissions report so that they can load in a few more fields from banner. The fields they need so far are: full admit code (right now its truncating it), gpa (up to 3 digits).

All the problems with the scarf report are now corrected. I just need to wait for final grades for the final submission.
Note to self when changing a UG student to NU: Make sure to null out the program code in the curriculum, otherwise it will try to load default values for an UG student, which will get you nowhere.

I'll need to start collecting data for dual enrolled and early entry students. The best way I found so far is to use the built in cohort form in Banner. All I need to do is create a cohort code in STVCHRT and then assign a student to that cohort in the form SGASADD.

I fixed a problem with the section tally where it was repeating certain courses that had multiple locations. I also added alternating coloring for each row so that its easier to identify courses with same crn.

Posted by soukupm at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2006

Staff Devlopement: Banner 7.3

For my staff developement this week, I read the Banner 7.3 student documentation to get a better idea about the changes that are coming when we upgrade in September. The major changes are to the race/ethnicity and concurrent curricula tables and their related forms, procedures, functions, etc. I created a document called "overview of changes.txt" in I:\programmers\Banner 7.3\ folder listing some changes that will affect us.

Posted by soukupm at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2006

Staff Development: VMS and Oracle views

This week I used my staff development time to learn more about the VMS commands and Oracle views. By far the most useful command is HELP. This will list most the available comands and how to use them. I found this site on the web to be very useful for learning VMS: OpenVMS beginner's FAQ. Another command that I didn't know existed: SEARCH. This is like a grep command where it will search through files in a directory for certain text. The syntax looks like this:

search "directory/file/* for wildcard" "text to look for"

Another command I found that'll be usefull too is spawn. This will spawn a process just like on a unix machine and you can set it so that it runs in the background. The syntax goes like this:

spawn/nowait/output=myoutput.txt myprog.exe

The other part of my staff development time was to research some of the views in oracle. A lot of these views are very useful when your looking for something specific in the database. For instance, your looking for the validation table behind the scenes for the ssbsect_subj_code in ssbsect. Since this is not nullable and has a constraint, we could do something like this to find more info:

select * from all_constraints where table_name like 'SSBSECT%';

This will return all the constraints for the SSBSECT table. Searching through the output I spot this:
FK1_SSBSECT_INV_STVSUBJ_CODE R SSBSECT
This shows me that the foreign key is with stvsubj. So that the table I was looking for.
There's lots of views available to most every developer with enough permissions. Here's a few that are very useful:

all_tables
all_views
all_indexes
all_table_columns
all_constraints
all_sequences

Posted by soukupm at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2006

Weekly report: NCAA report, Scarf Report

This week I was working on the NCAA graduation report. The report is broken down by gender,ethnicity, and another section on student athletes. It's a time consuming report because I have to work from an excel spreadsheet and pdfs provided by OUS. While I was working on a the report, I was going to double check the numbers that OUS sent me on athletes but I ran into a problem with the sgrsprt table. This is where the student athletes are stored. What I found is that during the 1999-00 and 2000-01 school year, the data is missing. I'm checking with the prior programmer on what happend during those 2 years. I figure the data was probably stored in a different table during that time. Once I find the data, I either backfill the table (with permission) or at least identify which table the data exists in my blog.

It's that time again of the term to start working on the scarf report. I sent in a pre end-of-term report to start fixing problems before the official submit. I've been doing this every term now since I never really know how many problems there will be to fix until I send it in. Plus at the end of term, there's usually lots of requests for reports, labels and many other duties that need to be done at that time.

Posted by soukupm at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)