UMRA – File / Data Distribution Management

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – File Distribution Management

As some of you know, I’ve been working in creating a File Distribution system with UMRA to send these files to students of a teachers year roster. Now at first you might think this task sounds fairly simple, and it’s a simple send 1 file to a student, and you’re done. However, this task actually is more complex than just that; it involves a complete UMRA Web Portal to accomplish this task. The school district I am working with wants to replace some, if not all the tools in Visual CASEL with a custom UMRA Web Portal. The web portal would allow them to still do the tasks they’ve always done before, however now they have more flexible ways to manage other work flows, other than File Distribution Management. But back to the topic, the client wanted a way for a teach to come into a portal, and display their current rosters there are stored in a SQL stored procedure. From here, the teacher can manage anyone on their roster; they can have the ability to reset student passwords, fix student home folders, set admin disables, and so much more. But the main part was to be able to select one or some files, then select one some or all students in a roster and then distrusted the files to those selected students. Now there are two big hurdles when you are doing a project like this, one is how to make a multi select upload, and how to keep track of the students who are selected in the list. Now don’t forget to put in error logic, that makes sure that files uploaded correctly, and that they actually selected someone on the roster list.

Here is how I was able to make a temporary upload area for the teacher to add files to until they are ready to distribute them. When the teacher first goes to the “Assignment Management” section in the portal, I will do a check to see if they have any files in a special Temp Upload Directory in the Teachers home folder, if there are any files, show them on the page, and if they don’t, display nothing. If the teacher does not have this file for Temp Upload, have UMRA create the folder. From here, you just allow the Teacher to select files, and upload them until the list is ready for distribution. Again, don’t forget to add error logic to make sure the teacher has files to distribute, and that they actually selected one some or all students from a list.

In my next blog post I will talk more about what happens after the teacher distributes the files. However, below is a quick screen shot on this File Distribution Management System.