Inflexible Lists, Stealing Fields, and Imports

John Ronan
John Ronan
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions
I feel like I am constantly running up against limitations in the various list capabilities.

For example, my guidance department asked me if they could generate the transcripts of a collection of students who are going to (New York) State University Schools.


We do not record the student's college in our system, but I thought, if I could apply a list to a printout, I could just jam an admin custom field where I need it and build the list around that.


It turns out you can "print" transcripts on a given list but as far as I can tell, you can't filter on a custom field.


So I thought maybe I could steal another unused field that I *can* filter on [in this context] and use that.   

I don't like to do this but it's often the only option I have.


In this case, I chose 'boarding or day', which doesn't apply to our school.

I then thought that maybe I can use this field in several places to get around these shortcomings.

e.g. if I wanted the list to yield a certain 100 students or so for printing on Monday, I would simply import "Boarding" into their boarding or day field and filter on that.


This seemed good but the only SAFE way to use [or abuse ] this in the future for some other reason would be to set to 'Day' all the students that have "Boarding" set [from the last time]and then set ONLY the ones I was interested in now and then apply the list to them.


So, I thought, each time I wanted to use this technique, my import file would have records to set all student records to 'Day'  in the first 1,500+ records (our enrollment) and then have the records to set to 'Boarding' at the end of the import file.


It'd be a simple, safe convention to follow.   UNFORTUNATELY, my experience is, if a student appears in an import file more than once, it seems that ONLY the first appearance is applied.

So, in order to do this, safely, I'd have to:

- create a job to set  boarding or day to 'Day'

- wait for it to end

- THEN run a separate job to set the new collection to 'Boarding'.


Does anyone have any other ideas of how to do this?

Is it consistent that only the first instance of a student in an import file is affected?


If I submitted two jobs in succession (the first to set to 'Day'; and the second to set to 'Boarding'), can I be guaranteed the first job will complete before the second one commences?


Is this anyone else's experience?  

Comments

  • Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
    We collect alumni college information in School. We are wrapping up our first year using K12 and have created an abbreviated Profile Update form for our graduating seniors. We ask them for the college name, anticipated graduation year, anticipated course of study, and whether they plan to participate in a gap year. We have a separate Profile Update form for our older alumni to capture more information, including their career information, etc. 


    And to your point of re-purposing fields, yes, it is very tempting at times, but I try to avoid this course. If it becomes unavoidable, I do an informal internal poll of my colleagues to confirm that the soon-to-be coopted field is expendable. I put out the question even when I know that the field is not in use at all throughout our system.
  • David Gillespie
    David Gillespie
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    John - to your very last point, it has always been my experience that all jobs are processed in order, unless, of course, one fails.  I have a task to import families from Raiser's to Educ Mgmt and it requires six separate files where the later ones depend on the earlier ones working.  I upload them to the import process in order and just let them run and all is OK.


    As for repurposing fields, I don't love it either, but sometimes that's what you gotta do ... :)

Categories