One of my customers asked if I could help him with displaying House Points in SharePoint. The school had already decided that they wanted a House Point system, in the network managers words, like Harry Potter, and the network manager had figured out a way of assigning them by modifying the behaviour events in CMIS to have positive or negative points. What he needed from me was a query to retrieve the total points for the Houses from CMIS to display in a chart on their smart boards and also in SharePoint and then once that was done some more detailed information for the logged in pupil.
Creating the query was a case of figuring out the database structure. As all the events are configurable, it was a little tricky, but once I’d got my head round it, it was straight-forward enough. That took care of their smart boards as they came with built in charting facilities. For SharePoint, I could have created a charting web part, but I had a bit of a look round first, and came up with Bamboo solutions Chart Web Part. This had the advantage of already working, multiple chart formats and the school could re-use it if they had any other charting requirements. The only tricky bit with the Bamboo web part is that the school wanted each column as a different colour so I had to turn the result into a pivot table which is not the easiest in SQL Server.
That was the charts sorted, now we wanted to display for a pupil when they are logged in:
1. The pupil’s house
2. A summary of their points: total, total positive and total negative
3. The details of each event together with the points scored.
4. A summary of the points for all the houses: again total, total positive and total negative
To enable this I created the Data Viewer web part I talked about in my last post. This enabled me to display the above information just by writing a new query, which was simple as I already understood the database structure and the pupil’s ID was already stored in Active Directory.
Result was a site showing all the House Point information requested. It looks good and hopefully will inspire the pupils to make a success of the House system.
The latest Salamander web part is Salamander Data Viewer. It basically allows you to run a SQL query against a database and display the results in a grid styled in a SharePoint manner. It’s not dissimilar to the Data View you can add throuh SharePoint Designer, but is simpler to use and you can use parameterised queries. It’s a quick and easy way to display data from your databases in SharePoint.
The current features are:
- Grid is sortable
- Grid supports paging
- Can add to a page from the web part gallery rather than altering the page in SharePoint Designer
- Can have parametrised queries. Currently supports using Active Directory attributes of the logged in user, but it’s very simple to add other types such as items in the query string. I’ll add more as they get requested
If anyone is interested then drop me a line and you can get a trial version. The page on the main web site is http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/dataViewer.html.
I recently helped a customer install the Sims Profile Details Web Part. I actually became aware of his problem after spotting his post on Edugeek. It looked like it would be quite simple to solve and as he was an existing customer, even though I had nothing to do with his SLG I offered to help.
From the description it looked like the web part needed a property stating the spell check page set before it could be displayed. In fact the web part errored so badly that the whole page could not display and you had to go to the web part maintenance page to remove it before you could view it again. I knocked up a quick utility to instantiate the web part, set the appropriate property and then add it to the page. It took a bit of time to get the configuration settings exactly right – at one point I had it appearing above the page title!, but when I got them right it went straight on.
One of the reasons I wanted to help out, was that the next piece of work for Salamander SharePoint is to add and maintain web parts. This was a great proof of concept for adding web parts to a page, and I’ve now got it integrated into the core product.
As it’s my first post, I guess that I ought to give a bit of information about myself.
As you can tell from the header my name is Richard Willis and I work for SalamanderSoft. SalamanderSoft is a small software house which specializes in integration products in the education sector and also writes SharePoint web parts. SalamanderSoft consists of myself as managing director, programmer, support team, marketing team and general dogsbody, and my wife, Helen, who deals with the important stuff like money.
In this blog I’m aiming to cover what I’m doing with our products, some technical stuff about SharePoint and useful news about the education sector.