This Week's Tweaks

Friday 29 July 2011 04:07 pm

script
added in london addresses and postcodes for Kingston University pharmacy students & changed it to use english settings for them. Giving their staff access on monday

migration
migration workshops. set up databases for attendance extension and altered all db calls to use the variables in inc_config. will need to remove the groups code and add in their class stuff

radiation database
asked to change dropdowns but once I'd seen how the system worked this just involved adding in temporary storage. it was useful to have a look at it though, seems much easier to work with than the previous version. Gave the 'print label' icon a text link as well - someone hadn't seen it.

SIPBS website
fixed the photo slideshow. was going to link in the 360 tour of the new SIPBS building but their website appears to be having issues (intermittent & slow, now down). I think someone is DDoSing them

platinum drugs
fixed the links dropdown. a stray </div> was breaking that part of tinymce.

workshop jobs system
tidied this up as John wants to put PAT testing data on it - still some issues and need to see if we can do something to charge account codes for the work / parts

Posted by tim

programme_users_MIS data

Thursday 21 July 2011 12:06 pm

The central data that spider uses to determine students' reg numbers from their DS credentials has had all the 2010-2011 entries removed. This has meant that all students with old accounts on the system have been redirected to their old registration numbers. Spider assumes that this means the student has switched courses so tries to update their accounts with the classes etc associated with the old reg number. This fails as there is nothing listed for the old reg number in 2010-11.

As a short term fix I've disabled the MIS lookup (myHome.php 43 - 75). There's no point getting the previous data back from the mysql backups as it will be overwritten by the overnight repopulation of this table. 

Posted by tim

1 comment

UPDATE: reran the script to update the table with registry data, 2010-11 records are now in the view. Re-enabled the MIS lookup in myHome script. There still may be issues as the undergrad account of one of the people who reported this problem isn't in the new data

This Week's Tweaks

Thursday 14 July 2011 03:10 pm

Migration
started work on lab data extension. set up svn, added an inc_config, got system working with the moodle tables. Some minor issues remain, need a web-writable directory to write the csv for excel, cluster issues as per activities module, need styling etc but the translation procedure was quick / painless. got to refresh my knowledge of mysql command line*

two sessions of the migration workshop & spider admins meeting - no issues

SIPBS website
changed the old profile pages to use the publications data from the radmin system, previously it was using it's own system and the links to update this had been removed

SIPBS signage
these froze one morning at 6am (both systems) but came up ok when rebooted

FMT exercises
some changes to these pages, haven't changed the calculations so the marking won't work right but this was the case already because of fixes to account for bad experimental data in the previous session

*table id's seem to all need fixing: alter table xxxxxxxxx change id ID bigint(11) unsigned auto_increment;

Posted by tim

This Week's Tweaks

Friday 08 July 2011 04:22 pm

Radiation database v2
updated sealed sources with file upload for image + cert. Added lasers section to store laser info. Finished tweaks on UI (minor tweak to inc_style_main to fix boxForm class for styling of form data). Fixed stock history to discount rectify items when working out 'disposal pending'. Updated inc_functions with some PHPdoc comments. Fixed stock_reports to only show department's own stock when using 'view all labs'. Added U-23x isotopes.

Migration
started to work on 'activities' module on the Moodle dev server. Set up Eclipse with SVN module. Fixed/ updated a few bits in includes/. Reworked the create and projects scripts to use db vars stored in inc_config in combination with spider_api object to allow it to save data to mdl_ext_activities*. Need to sort out issues with clusters (change to use -> department value?). Still some work to be done on getting this module working, but promising so far.

Attended migration workshop. A few issues with migration surfaced (part exported class, missing class) and updated backupClass_JSON to allow choice of session content to export to allow for folk wanting to export sessions other than 10-11.

PG records database
had a quick look at funding updates, didn't get much done other than updating some CSS.

SIPBS website
added a gallery freeware script (with some modifications so that it looks 'SIPBS') to give access to prize giving photos.

SPIDER home page
updated to link to twitter/facebook sites

This Week's Tweaks

Friday 01 July 2011 03:59 pm

Radiation database v2
minor bug fixes to stock_history, stock_usage_probes, stock_disposal_probes. Need to update stock_undo so it can manage to clear multiple events to handle undo of probe (probe creation + waste entry are 2 different events). Reworking UI on DEV to make use of CSS 3 to improve look & feel as well as widening page. Minor issue with monthly_lab/ monthly_actions - had left them 'read' only, so cron job ran them but they made no updates to database - quickly re-ran manually so that changes were stored. Also updated monthly_actions to allow on/off status for stocks, sinks, swabs, temp store decay/resetting. Updated monitors with option to add a calibration certificate file to each calibration event.  Updated bin_history to show decay events for temp store decays.

web manager
updated to allow staff who have sub-pages to manage these - link was removed when SIPBS site was updated recently.

ODBC/ Oracle interface
updated staff.php to include Oracle/VAX staff number - for PG_DB, below.

PG records database
updated change_supervisor request form to include staff number in email to centre. Reports pending tool updated to display names and use email from central data for supervisors (covers local and external supervisors now without having to maintain separate externals list). Added links to help wiki pages (updated the wiki help for PG DB too).

includes
added getUserStaffNumber($DS_username) to inc_functions_data. Returns staff number from staff_MIS table. Updated inc_functions with PHPDoc comments. Updated inc_form and inc_form_blocks to handle file upload element (new/add + edit). Added inc_file_upload script to handle basic file uploads (for radiation monitors, see above).

admin/stats
updated OS and browser stats to pick up latest browsers/phones, updated breakdown of iPhone/Pad/Pod plus fix for Chrome with vNum greater than 10.

Migration
seems several classes were missed from the previous s2 export. Converted list from LTE team and created a new admin/backup script to accept array of class code strings instead of querying db on semester. 

The LTE guys added a few updates to the Moodle topic format to allow for collapsible topics and s1/s2 separation, which should help with the usability/ viewing of files in classes with large amounts of content.

Worked on some quizzes on myPlace to check for issues between SPIDER and Moodle quiz options/ question types. Worked out how to get random questions in to the quiz. Rather than being a property of the 'quiz' itself, its achieved via the 'question bank', using 'categories'. By adding some questions to two different categories, there is an option in the 'question bank' to 'add x random questions' from each category in the question bank to the quiz, allowing for a quiz to have random sub-sets of questions.

Second issue was to do with feedback - dragNdrop questions on SPIDER have per option feedback, which has not translated to Moodle's 'matching' question type. The LTE team are already on the case (pointed this out to them a wee while back) so there should be a solution for this at some point soon.  Another feedback issue is that the only way I can see to get 'immediate feedback' (feedback shown as soon as you answer each question) is to run the quiz in 'Adaptive mode'. However, this allows the student to retry (submit) the question until they get it right, which isn't quite what we need - have just passed this last issue to the LTE team to see if there is a solution - there may be a setting/option somewhere that I'm just not seeing.

Next week - must get on to the myPlace DEV server (they gave us access a week or two ago now, but been unable to get away from radiation fixes) and test/ sort out any issues with the SPIDER modules that are going to run via the 'translator'.