display of official name

Administration
1

Hello. in our school we are use to calling students by their official names. how do i change the system to display student by their official names instead of their surname and last name. its becoming tedious for teachers and staff to find students.

2

Hi Viny,

At current this is not possible in Gibbon, I’m afraid : ( The function that deals with naming does not accept the official name, only title, surname and preferred name. To change this, every SQL query in the system that deals with names would need to fetch official name, and then pass it to this function.

Can you give us an example of how you use official name, and surname and preferredName for a fictional student? I’d be interested to check to make sure we are using these terms in the same way.

Thanks,

Ross

3

here is a sample screen shot so am preffering showing official name instrad of prefered name

4

at the moment they dispaly the surname first and first name socond. i would prefer they display official names instead in all the places. or atleast a pop up showing the official name once the cursor is placed on a name.

5

To change this system-wide is hard. It would involve quite many changes, which will be lost as soon as you do an update.

6

ok is there a way it can show both then? without alterling the initial architecture.

7
Hi Viny,

At current this is not possible in Gibbon, I’m afraid : ( The function that deals with naming does not accept the official name, only title, surname and preferred name.

If it is possible to use the preferred name - would it be an option to copy the official name to the preferred name field (either via SQL or reimporting the users)?

8

The preferred name ideally would not contain the surname, as many screens will display “surname, preferredName”, or “preferredName surname”. However, if you wanted to use it this way, you could edit the Format::name function so that it only displays the preferred name, and then use an SQL statement like the following:

UPDATE gibbonPerson SET preferredName=officialName;`

Warning: this would be a destructive operation, as all previous preferred names would be overwritten, and it may look odd in the system unless you edit the code in some areas. Be sure to backup your database first and ideally test this out on local system before using in production.