June 2014 News

2 June 2014

See how the release of the AccuTrack's and AccuSQL's Engineerica Systems, Inc. - Celebrating 20 years of excellence!Waiting List TV Display and Quick Panel fit nicely together, Laura's Blog post on TRiO Center Reports in AccuTrack / AccuSQL, tech tips for Accudemia, and more!  Here is an index of the topics: 

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New Waiting List Marquee is a Perfect
Companion to Quick Panel for
AccuTrack and AccuSQL

By DAVID FOSTER - JUNE 15, 2014

If you use either the Intake System or Activity Waiting List feature in AccuTrack or AccuSQL to control the intake of your students, we have great news for you: we developed software that will project the waiting list on a secondary monitor such as an LCD TV you may have setup in your waiting area.  The Marquee uses a web browser window to make it possible for students in the waiting list to view their place in line or how many students are ahead of them if they have not signed in to the intake system.  Using this option, students will not need to access the Intake System or Activity Waiting List option in AccuTrack or AccuSQL itself to get this information; it will be right in front of them.

Here is a sneak peek. In this example, there are 13 people waiting in an Advising Center:

The screen will automatically rotate views to show all the people in the list:

The Quick Panel then can help you manage those students in the intake system easily and perform all the functions from one interface.  This will cut down on the time it normally takes to navigate around AccuTrack or AccuSQL performing various functions such as editing session comments, completing session questionnaires, viewing the students' logs, viewing their registration and more.  Watch the video we recorded to show all the functions of the Quick Panel as well as illustrating the typical workflow of navigating through the Quick Panel.

If any of these add-on programs sound like something that might be helpful at your center contact us for a complimentary test copy.  You must have AccuTrack or AccuSQL 2014.  Simply send an e-mail to support@accutrack.org.

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Accudemia Tech Tip - Implementing SSO
(Single Sign-On)

By NICK ARMSTRONG - JUNE 16, 2014

Don't be intimidated by the seemingly daunting task of creating and easy way for your student, tutor, and admins to login to Accudemia via your school's portal.  It is far easier than it may seem.  As a support person here at Engineerica I noticed this feature is something that schools want to offer their users but are afraid to get started or maybe do not know where to do so.  Here we will go through the process of implementing SSO (Single Sign-On) easily for your institution.

Several Pre-Requisites

  1. You will need access to place hyperlinks into your webpages and create webpages/add files to your school's portal.  Usually this can be done via the Web Development Specialists at your school who can modify the files directly on your web server.  Others will need their privileges to be elevated on the school's portal or website so they can create/modify webpages on your school's website via a web-based WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor.
  2. You will need to obtain your Accudemia Developer Key.  This can be done simply by a College-Level Admin account in Accudemia under the Administration section and clicking Advanced > Developers.  You will need this later once we want to create the Accudemia redirect webpage.

Let's get Started!

Now that we have the pre-requisites taken care of we can begin with actually implementing SSO.  If you don't understand how this process works, as far as from a security standpoint, you can read this article on the Accudemia Developer Documentation.  Basically your Portal already has authenticated the users and we have it pass us a secret key (token) with the user's ID to automatically login the user to Accudemia.  Now follow these steps using ASP.NET:

  1. On the root of your site, create a page called RedirectAccudemia.aspx, and put the following code:
    <%@ImportNamespace="System.IO"%>
<%@ImportNamespace="System.Net"%>
<%@PageLanguage="C#"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<htmlxmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
        <title>Accudemia - Loading...</title>
</head>
<body>
        <%
        // USER CONFIGURATIONS
        conststring domain ="yourcollege.accudemia.net";
        conststring devKey ="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx";
        string userId =System.Threading.Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity.Name;
       
        // Request the login token to the service
        string serviceUrl =string.Format("https://{0}/Services/PublicHttp.ashx?devkey={1}&action=getlogintoken&user={2}", domain, devKey, userId);
        WebRequest req =WebRequest.Create(serviceUrl);
        string loginToken;
        try
        {
                WebResponse response = req.GetResponse();
                using(Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream())
                using(StreamReader reader =newStreamReader(stream))
                {
                        loginToken = reader.ReadToEnd();
                }
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
                // Handle errors, and show a message
                Response.Write("<h2>Unable to access Accudemia.</h2>");
                Response.Write("Please try again in a few minutes or contact your system administrator.<br><br>");
                Response.Write("<b>Error returned by the server:</b><br>");
               
                WebException we = e asWebException;
                using(Stream stream = we.Response.GetResponseStream())
                {
                        byte[] buffer =newbyte[stream.Length];
                        stream.Read(buffer,0, buffer.Length);
                        Response.OutputStream.Write(buffer,0, buffer.Length);
                }
                return;
        }
        // If a login token was obtained, redirect to Accudemia
        conststring redirectUrl ="https://{0}/?token={1}&fwd={2}&Referer={3}";
        string forwardUrl =Request.QueryString["fwd"]??"";
        if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(forwardUrl))
        {
                forwardUrl ="/Private/Main.aspx";
        }
        string specifiedReferer =Request["Referer"];
        string httpReferer =Request.UrlReferrer!=null?Request.UrlReferrer.OriginalString:null;
        string currentDomain =Request.Url.Scheme+"://"+Request.Url.Authority;
       
        string referer = specifiedReferer ?? httpReferer ?? currentDomain;
        referer =Server.UrlEncode(referer);
        Response.Redirect(string.Format(redirectUrl, domain, loginToken, forwardUrl, referer));
        %>
</body>
</html>
  2. You need to configure the code above in the webpage to use your developer keys, where it says:
    const string domain = "yourcollege.accudemia.net";
const string devKey = "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx";
string userId = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity.Name;

    The domain is the address you usually use to access Accudemia.

    The devkey is the developer key you get from Accudemia, as described in the section Before Start: Get your Developer Keys!.

    The userId is a bit harder to set up, because it depends on how your application works. You probably are using the .NET Principal class or the Session to store the current logged in user. If Principals are being used, you can leave it as is; if the user information is stored in the Session, your code might look like this:

    string userId = Session["UserId"] as string;

    It all depends on how your Portal works. If you are not sure about it, please ask your Web Development Specialists for more help.

  3. Next edit the webpage in the Portal source code to add a link to Accudemia. For instance, add this on your site's menu:
    <ahref="/RedirectAccudemia.aspx">Access Accudemia</a>

    Also, you can have other links to access specific pages of Accudemia. If you want your users to see a link pointing to Create New Appointment, for example, add the following:

    <ahref="/RedirectAccudemia.aspx?fwd=/Private/Appointments/OpenSlots.aspx">Create a New Appointment in Accudemia</a>

Done!  For a complete working example visit our mock Portal Website and login with the Student User ID of 555555555 and a password of 1234.  You can download all the source code of our mock Portal Website as well.  Additionally if you want the PHP version of the code visit here.

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AccuLite - Beautiful Export Reports

By NICK ARMSTRONG - JUNE 1, 2014

Recently I was asked to help clean up the data from some exports from an AccuLite software installation and due to the impression it made on the Center Manager I figured I could share it with everyone.  So here is an example of how to beautify the export reports you get from AccuLite:

1.) Get your Export Report

1.  Login as an Admin.
2.  Now from the System Administration Section click the Reports section.
3.  Then set your Report Settings and click the Export Data button.
4.  Choose to open directly in Excel or Save As Excel file.

At this point you would fine for using the data to import into another software program maybe that may need the information.  However if you do not have other software that further analyzes the data you can do the following to make these exports make sense and look good.

2.) Beautify the Export Report

Once you have the file in Excel we can manipulate it further.  In our example we are using a "Student Visits" export report.

1.  First let's get rid of unnecessary columns like "Alias_ID", "Task_ID", and "SubTask_ID" in the file.  In order to remove them select the columns by clicking each of the Letters at the top of the column you want to get rid of while holding the CTRL key.  Once all the columns are selected hit delete on the keyboard.

2.  Next let's rename the columns to make sense.  "Input_ID" can be renamed as "Student ID", "logintime" & "logouttime" to "Login Time" & "Logout Time", etc.  Highlight all of the headers and give them some color to make them pop out at you like shown below.

3.  You may want to reorder the columns by selecting them, right-clicking the columns, selecting cut, and right clicking the column you want to "Insert the cut cells" before.
       
4.  Now we added Subtotals using the built-in function of Excel.  Select all the columns, Go to the Data Tab, and click Subtotal.  When a pop-up box appears use the following settings:
       
5.  Next we want to take the Period and make it more readable so we will use this formula to convert the seconds into hours/minutes format.  We are going to make a second column with the named "Period" as well. and insert the following formula:
       =TEXT(ROUNDUP([CELL]/86400,2),"[h]:mm") OR
       =TEXT(ROUNDUP(G2/86400,2),"[h]:mm")
       NOTE: CELL is the cell of the period data you want to convert in the column beside it.

6.  Fill in the rest of the column with the same formula.  Press CTRL+SHIFT+END from the cell with the formulas which should select all the cells to bottom right corner of the data.  Now above on the Home Tab of MS Excel click the Fill > Down option to insert the formula into the rest of the cells of that column.  Another option is to double-clicking the bottom right corner shown below.  You can also hide the original Period column so it does not show when printing by selecting that column, right-clicking it, and selecting hide.
             
7.  Then we need to add a Visits column which is missing from the report (This is simply a count of how many times they came in for help).  Here again we use a formula:
       =IF([STUDENTID_CELL]="",COUNTIF([STUDENTID_COLUMN],[STUDENTID_CELL_ABOVE),"")
       =IF(A2="",COUNTIF(A:A,A1),"")
8.  Again Fill in the rest of the column with the same formula.  Once you fill the formula all the way down the column proceed to next step.

9.  Finally to make the student's Subtotal standout more on the report we are going to apply some Conditional Formatting.  To Start select all the columns in the report.  Then from the Home Tab above select Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules > New Rule... > Use a formula to determine which cells to format.  From there in the box place this formula:  =$A1="" (which means if ID column is blank) Last set the Formatting by clicking the Format... button.  Make sure to click OK twice and notice the changes.  I used Bold and a bottom border on mine in the example.

10. Done! For extra credit you can go into File > Print > Page Setup and change the way it prints the document.  Be sure to save your work in the Excel document now!  Click here to download the end result in an XLSX file.

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TRiO Annual Performance Report Guide
(AccuTrack & AccuSQL)

By LAURA ALVAREZ - JUNE 20, 2014

As we have stated previously in the Engineerica newsletter we are committed to giving you articles and information relevant to your software and reporting needs via our AccuTrack/AccuSQL blog.  And if you are a TRiO center this article pulled from one of the weekly posts will be invaluable for measuring the program's effectiveness using AccuTrack/AccuSQL's reporting:

This week’s blog is geared toward alleviating some of the heavy reporting burden shouldered by TRiO Student Support Services Programs. This information will also give an insight into the usage of AccuSQL/AccuTrack’s Session Questionnaire feature that will be useful for all educational programs and departments. While the Session Questionnaire is in the current 2014 version of AccuTrack/AccuSQL, the summary report for this feature which contains a distinct count of students will be available in the 2015 AccuTrack/AccuSQL software. This new version is scheduled for release in October 2014 which is just in time for the 2013-2014 APR submission.   Read more...

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