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Office of Institutional Research

Month: June 2017

Cycle 59

6/5/2017 – 6/16/2017

Work Complete

Appreview

  • Logging for updates from MyGrad applicant data now has a pruning routine.

Student

  • Added logging for all user instigated changes to student record. New logging model stores compiled message for simpler review. Log view available from student detail under page level menu (Student… upper right).
  • New "typeahead" search for students. As user types in search field matching students are suggested. Suggestions include student name, email, program, and status. Back end includes a search optimized index and maintence routines to keep the index updated.
  • Edit placement form uses pointer mouse cursor hint to indicated mentors can be clicked (add mentor to placement).
  • Nightly import process that brings advisor assignments from Appreview to Student database. Student database is the authoritative home for advisor assignments, so this import only creates advisors records when the student has no advisor in Student database. Import matches on student, program, and start quarter.
  • Created a new home page for Student Database with intention to make system more approachable. Emphasize search, highlight the most useful views, make all the features more discoverable. (Currently in test environment getting user feedback. Will be promoted to production soon.)

Test Scores

  • Fixed certificate name not being displayed in views. Model property name change had not been fully updated.

Infrastructure

  • The system context menu (upper right corner, switch from Student to Appreview, Tech Support, etc) is now fixed to the view port instead of the top of page. This resolves an issue where scrolling down a page, then activating the context menu presented a seemingly empty menu.
  • Fixed issue where URLs with trailing slashes ("https://educ.uw.edu/students/") would incorrect result in a "Page Not Found" message.
  • Major restructuring of client side JavaScripts and style sheets. Reorganized these component files to make them better labeled and locatable during developement. Cleaned out code inherited from previous projects, no longer used. Implented a strategy to keep vendor libraries up to date. Created automated build pipelines to assembly production builds.
  • Updated authorization notifications. We use the Person database to monitor user authorizations. Other college systems send notifications to Person, when a user's authorization is modified. These API clients needed to be updated for token API authentication.

Cycle 58

5/22/17 – 6/2/17

Long Term Planning

As the academic year wraps up and we work through the Student database punch list we are also working on long term planning for information system development. So far we have met this Undergrad team and Carlson Center to plan for undergraduate placements, certification team to plan for filling in test score data, and grants support team to review the Grants database. As long term plans are drafted they will be posted on this blog.

Work Complete

Person

  • Incorportated new student related tables into the person merge process. This included new routines for the 20 or so tables with person references in student. Rebuild of person merge to increase its modularity while decoupling it from some external dependencies.
  • Utility that can re-apply historic person merges using current merge logic.

Infrastructure

  • Update the EDUC project (Appreview, Student, Testscores, etc) to use lazy UW login. This allows the local application policies to dictate when a user needs to be authenticated and sends them away to UW login page only when needed.
  • Removed the /a/ and /b/ from EDUC project URLs. These were needed because previously it was web server (Apache) configuration determining when a user needed to be logged in.
  • Web service token authentication. When College of Education applications request data from each other (example Faculty Merit Report in Courses asks Student database for advising data) it passes a token which authorizes this inter-application API access.
  • Upgraded application framework and vendor packages for EDUC (Laravel 5.4).
  • Migrated JavaScript build utility to Webpack. This allows for more sophisticated client side application development using latest features while maintaing backward compatibility with the most common browsers.
  • Re-organized style-sheets to create a more concise and intuitive layout.
  • Prototyped a new application UI. This UI makes better use of browser viewport space, is more friendly on smaller mobile screens, accomodates large menu layouts, and makes UI components (e.g. Search) more obvious.