Formatting Data Extracted from SIS for Sloopy

Overview

When installing Sloopy for the first time and at the beginning of a new school year, District Admins need to extract data from SIS and format it into plain text tab-delimited files that are imported into School Loop. This article gives the solution for the formats that are required for the various types of data.

Prerequisites

You need to have access to the SIS or have the data exported from SIS by another person.

Solution

You need to create a separate set of data files for each school. File names should be different - you can add the school code to the name of each file (e.g., CTS_courses.txt, where CTS is the school code).

Note: It is the responsibility of the District to write a script that extracts the necessary data and turns it into tab-delimited files. All data is compressed and encrypted before sending via SMTP.

All data files for School Loop must be:

• Plain text
• In ASCII encoding
• Tab-delimited
• There should be no column headers and no quotes around data values.

Notes:

• Filenames are not case sensitive.
• The same data rows in various files are highlighted with the same color.
• If you have configured the data.prefix value in the Sloopy config file, each file must have an additional first column that contain the data prefix value for the corresponding school.

The following files need to be created and placed in the data folder located in the folder for the selected SIS (e.g., sloopy/Generic/data); the files must follow the format provided below for each file.

• Courses.txt - contains all courses and their titles for a school.
  
  

  Course ID	Title
  The id that sections use to identify the course. Unique per school	Title of The course

  
  Example:
  
  
• Teachers.txt - contains all teacher IDs and names for a school.
  

   

  Teacher ID	Last Name	First Name
  The ID that sections use to identify the teacher	Last name of the teacher	First name of the teacher

  
  Example (these are fake names and IDs used for demo purposes):
  
  
  

   

• Students.txt - contains all students, their IDs, and grades for a School.

  Local ID	Permanent ID	Last Name	First Name	Middle Name	Grade
  The ID that is used to assign the student to a section	Permanent ID is used for attendance and call alerts. The same ID as Local ID can be used.	Last Name	First Name	Middle Name or Initial	Grade (numeric)

  
  Example (these are fake names and IDs used for demo purposes; the last names are blurred to avoid any coincidences):
  
  
• Sections.txt - Contains information about sections: terms when the sections are active, periods, courses under which sections are assigned, and teachers assigned to teach sections. 
  
  

  Section ID	Term Code	Period	Course ID	Teacher ID
  The ID that is used to identify the section for assigning a student to a section	The Term for which this section is active	The Period for the section (numeric field)	Course ID	Teacher ID

  
  Example:
  
  
• StudentSections.txt - contains information about students assigned to sections.
  
  

  Local ID	Section ID
  The Student ID that is used to place the student in a section	Section ID

  
  

  Example:
  
  

• AttendanceDay.txt (optional) - contains attendance information for students on a daily basis.

  Permanent ID	Date	Attendance Code
  Permanent Student ID	Date in the MM/DD/YY or MM/DD/YYYY format	The SIS value for a full day absence or presence

   

• AttendanceSection.txt (optional) - contains attendance information for students per period for each day.

  Permanent ID	Date	Attendance Code	Section ID
  Permanent Student ID	Date in the MM/DD/YY or MM/DD/YYYY format	The SIS value for a period of absence	Section ID

   

• CallAlert.txt (optional) - contains phone numbers for unregistered parents. When the call alerts feature is enabled for the school, unregistered parents will receive a call alert for newly created assignments with selected Priority Alert.

  Permanent ID	Phone Number	Language
  Permanent Student ID	Parent phone number in the format: 555-555-5555	Specify one of the available Call Alert languages: Arabic, Armenian, Cantonese, English, Farsi, French, German, Haitian, Hindi, Hmong, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Samoan, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese. The default should be English if no parent language is listed or is not one of the above.

  
  Example:
  
  

Here is a summary table for all files:

Confirmation

Once you have finished preparing the files, open the data folder (e.g., sloopy/Generic/data) and open the files - confirm that their format is the same as in the examples above.

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