My primary concern is adding student responsibilities, e.g., Head Boy and Girl, House Captain, and Class Prefect to name a few. I can add custom fields to the user profile; however, the problem arises when some responsibilities only apply for a year. Custom fields are okay if they are for transcripts. However, term reports can cause anomalies, or if I have to update an old report, they can end up displaying the wrong responsibilities for that year.
Is it possible to have a separate function or module to record responsibilities and have a block in the report template manager to add the contents to reports?
Best regards,
Andy Richards,
Head of ICT, British West Indies Collegiate.
This is an interesting case that I haven’t encountered with the schools I work with, but it sounds like a very common part of British school culture. As you’ve noted, custom fields are attached to a user, so they persist from year to year, and could cause problems if you wished to track historical data.
I think one solution, which would require a bit of development in the core, would be to enable custom fields for Student Enrolment records. These are the database records that link a student to a particular school year and form group, so they are both student and year specific, and would allow you to add a Responsibility field with either text or drop-down to track a student’s responsibility for that school year.
I can add it to our list for v25 development. Our dev capacity is currently quite limited and the list is quite long, so I can’t make any promises, but I can try to find some time to add this feature to the core.
Hi Andy, I’ve added this feature to v25, releasing January 20, 2023. The code changes can be found here, however since there are database changes involved I would recommend waiting until the v25 release and updating then.
I was going to ask about databases anyway. Should a database conversion to MYSQL 8 on my shared hosting? Is this advisable, or are you addressing a potential upgrade to MYSQL 8 in the v25 release?