Data import of users and Fast Finder

Administration
1

@skuipers I have been happily using your Data Admin module to migrate various kinds of data to Gibbon, particularly users.

However, I have encountered a couple of snags that I suspect are related to each other:

  1. Upon import all users are marked as Status = Left, regardless of the value given in the import (which I set as Full). In order to fix this problem, I modified php script ./cli/userAdmin_statusCheckAndFix.php to change all users to Status = Full. Then when I enroll students, they appear in the People - Students. So far so good. But I was puzzled by the change of status.
  2. None of the staff appear on the People - Staff page, though I manually set their status to Full and added a valid date for their start date (and deleted invalid dates for end dates).
  3. None of the users that I have imported appear in the Fast Finder when I type their names.

Any idea how to make sure that staff appear as staff and enable users for Fast Finder? That is a nice feature I would like to make full use of.

2

Hi @dcowens76, glad to hear the Data Admin module has been helpful!

  1. This is certainly a bug, thanks for spotting it! (the filter was checking against a set of values specific to our schools old SIS). I’ve updated the code and commited a fix to the Data Admin development branch: https://github.com/SKuipers/module-dataAdmin/tree/develop

  2. Staff will only show up in People - Staff and the FastFinder once a Staff record has been created (separate from the user). There’s an import type for this, under “Staff / Faculty - Staff details (for existing users)”. There’s only one required field, so you can often use the same file as the user upload, just keep the Username & Role columns and choose ‘Skip this column’ for the rest.

  3. Students will also only show up in FastFinder once they’re enrolled in the current school year. The import type ‘Student Enrolment’ can be used for bulk student enrollment (if the year groups and roll groups have already been defined).

Once staff records and student enrollments exist you should see them in the FastFinder.

Thanks! Give a shout if you have any other data-import questions.

3

Thank you for responding quickly with that, @skuipers. I will do the staff import. Again, the module has been super helpful. It did have to sort out the logical order of items to import. Shall I post my findings here or somewhere else, in case someone else needs to sort this out?

4

Sure, feel free to post it here. Perhaps it’s something that could be added to the module to help people getting started with fresh install.

Also if you come across anything that needs an import type defined free to let me know, I’m happy to expand the default set of importable data. The importer can also handle User Custom Fields, it just requires editing a text file to define a custom import structure (I haven’t written any documentation for that yet). If you find yourself needing to import any custom data just give a shout.

5

Okay, thanks.

6

In the end, either the staff import or manually adding users as staff or both worked. I am not sure. Is there an index that updates periodically for the Fast Finder? Anyway, thanks for your help, @skuipers.

7

David, if you look in config.php you will find a variable called $caching, which is set to 10 by default. Some reusable elements of the page, such as the main menu, message count, fast finder, etc, are cached in a session variable to save generating them every time. In v13 Fast Finder has become AJAX powered, but the list of actions is still cached. If you server is powerful enough, or if you are still in testing, you can experiment with reducing the cache level to get things more responsive. Ross.

8

Perhaps check the People > Students and People > Staff lists. Do users show up under either of these lists? If they do show up here, then the issue could certainly be with the FastFinder, otherwise it’s likely with the staff/student records themselves (roles, status, end/start dates, etc).

9

Sorry, I was probably not clear. Things ARE working now. I just tried several steps, and I was not sure which was the decisive solution. Thank you.

I asked about the caching issue because I noticed there was a delay between initially adding staff and their being available in the Fast Finder. But the delay was not long.