February 26, 2018

Cycle 73

2/5/2018 – 2/23/2018

Work Complete

Appreview

• Updated Apply portal for new applicant questions required for ECFS and ECO. The answers to these questions are now displayed in the Appreview applicant detail page in a section labeled "Supplements".

Courses

• Fixed person typeahead input in "Add Instructional Staff" form, was displaying ghost text in Mac Safari.
• Fixed instructors who were assigned to multiple meetings got double counted in the "John Smith +2" list views.
• Standardized system used to show and hide parts of a web page and ported code from old platform.
• Implement calculation and verification of projected enrollment and room size values. This ensures that these interrelated fields have consistent, logical values before storing in the database.

Recruitment

• Added better handling for email addresses rejected by mail server. Our system does email address validation on syntax, but doesn't verify that the email domain has a responsive email server to accept the message. Added strategy to deal with these outlier cases so entire email batches aren't stopped by one bad address.

Student 

• Reworked updates from student transcript to be more robust. In an attempt to minimize our footprint the student database would attempt to process transcript data once per quarter and only transcript data from the previous quarter. This ended up being fragile and not capturing the student history we needed. The revised system looks for any student who's last full transcript check happened before last quarters grades became available and then analyzes each student's full transcript. This gives a full fresh review of transcript and if anything goes wrong (UW data not available) the system automatically catches up the next run.

Tech Support

• Equipment records have "specs" which are hardware properties that can vary by equipment. For example it can be helpful for us to track the operating system of a laptop, but that has no real meaning for a flipcam. Tech team is able to dynamically create new spec categories as needed. Existing equipment data and web views have been converted to specs.

Infastructure

• Built a central dashboard which logs info system nightly maintenance jobs. Our college databases have around 15 distinct maintenance routines that run each night. Tracking these jobs was a tedious process that involved many log files and mail boxes and didn't get reviewed as frequently as I'd like. The new system shows all maintenance runs and any problems in a single view.
• Extracted code used to work with academic quarters into a shared library.