SchoolTool

An Access to Report card Markup language

Asked by y2s

Dear SchoolTool,

I was in the process of finding a decent program to use in our school and found your program to be a very attractive option. In VirtualBox, I got the system running with SchoolTool and showed it to some of the teachers to get their opinions. Though we haven't had any extensive testing to see if it's in fact suitable for our use, but we all liked what we were able to do in such short period of time. Only a few things that currently stops me from doing a lengthy field testing is that is the report card.

Our school need to keep the format of our report card the same even if we move to a new system. In the description, the program apparently has a HTML-like markup language for creating report cards, but I failed to find any way of accessing them.

What would be the best way to have a customized report card formmated to a certain specification? It would end up have to be a double-sided foldable sheet where the front and back cover would contain school emblem along with the school and teacher information while the inside would layout the student grade per subject. I wouldn't mind doing formatting myself if it's close enough to how HTML is done. This is one of the major stumbling block I have of using the program :s

Thanks for the great program, and I wish I could resolve all the issues to help me convince the school of its usefulness. Please help.

cheers,

tony

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#1

Could you just send us a scan of the report card format?

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y2s (y2s1982) said : 		#2

Thank you for a very timely reply. I have a few questions on that.

- Would a pdf copies with bogus student info be acceptable?
- Is there an email address or place to upload this copy?
- Also, certain elements of the report may change from year to year, particularly the evaluation points for any given subject. Would I need to ask for help/ bug dev any such changes each semester?
- Is the report card formatting hardcoded into the program with no way to access them by users?

Again, thank you for the timely reply and help.

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#3

Hi y2s,

Bogus student info is fine, preferable, actually. I just jumped straight to asking for an example so we could see how complicated your report is, which would determine how much of it you could easily do yourself.

You can just send it to <email address hidden>.

The formatting is defined in a very HTML-ish (XML) markup language, so updating that will be relatively easy. Small changes in database fields, etc., should be fairly easy too. If we go through this process with you, one thing we'll be doing at the same time is creating a generic custom report stub and documentation to guide other people through the same process, so the whole thing will become a bit clearer. Basically small changes you should be able to do yourself, but you may need help for bigger ones.

The report card formatting isn't accessible through the web interface. It has to be configured in the file system. Custom reports do go in a separate package so they aren't overwritten by updates.

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cr (chrisroch) said : 		#4

Good day,

I would like to find out if there is any documentation available, detailing the steps to modifying the report card. I would like to add our school's logo and additional static data.

Thank you.

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#5

Hi cr,

In the current version you can add a school logo under "School Name" on the School page (yeah, we need to update that to "School Information" or something). I don't remember exactly to which version that feature was added.

Overall documentation for the markup language -- RML -- is available here: www.reportlab.com/docs/rml2pdf-userguide.pdf‎

I need to get together with a developer to write some basic customization instructions. The best way to get results is to just tell us exactly what you want. Specific instructions are 1000x easier than general ones.

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Emmanuel Awokoya (ewhothinks) said : 		#6

I think the improvement would be visible in the new release

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#7

We will be posting an example of a custom report -- which should help illuminate the process.

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zefanja (zefanja) said : 		#8

Hi Tom, did you already post the example you mentioned? I would like to create a custom report card for our school, too.

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#9

Oh... we've got the code written but need to write the documentation to make it useful. It is a priority.

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Charl Bouwer (zarachnia) said : 		#10

HI Tom

What is the current status? I would also like to create a custom report card for our school,

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Tom Hoffman (tom-hoffman) said : 		#11

Ah.... OK, we've still not got the documentation written, but here is a good example of a custom report card:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~schooltool-owners/schooltool.encinitas/trunk/files/head:/src/schooltool/

Can you help with this problem?

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