Custom Alert Icon on Class Attendance page of PowerTeacher

The main goal was to add custom alerts to the class attendance page on PowerTeacher, this page is visited by teachers daily and shows all students in the chosen class in one screen.

Alternatives require a teacher to click through each student on the /teachers/studentpages and also requires customizations be made for each of those pages.

The target page for this post is /teachers/classattendance.html but before we get to that we have first add a custom field for the alert, I just added a boolean field in an advanced DB extension called U_Info and added the column/field named Alert_customalertfield with default value of 0.

Then we need an alert icon, I used a .gif that was basically the favicon.ico of the alert type's website.  But any 16x16 .gif will do, add this to /images so that https://yourPSserver/images/alert_customalert.gif will show.

Next we have to add a place in PowerSchool to check this box, for this we will only allow folks with permission on the admin side to check.  I chose the "Other Information" page for a student on the PowerSchool Admin side.

just add a custom insertion point by adding this code just above the ending /table> tag on /admin/students/misc.html:

	<!-- custom insertion point added by someone on mm/dd/yyyy -->
	~[cust.insertion_point:custom.studentalerts]

view raw cust.insertion_point:custom.studentalerts hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then add this 'page fragment' called "misc.alert_customalert.custom.studentalerts.txt"
with this in it in the same directory as misc.html:

	<tr bgcolor="#f6f6f6">
	<td colspan="4" class="bold">custom Alert</td>
	</tr>
	<tr bgcolor="#edf3fe">
	<td class="bold">custom Alert</td>
	<td><input type="checkbox" name="[Students.U_Info]customalert" value="0"></td></tr>

view raw misc.alert_customalert.custom.studentalerts.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

To add this alert icon to the admin side its a simple page fragment called:"title_student_end_css.alert_customalert.student.alert.txt"inserting into: "~[cust.insertion_point:student.alert]"
to do this create a file named "title_student_end_css.alert_customalert.student.alert.txt" in this directory  /wildcards/ with this in it

	<!-- Start of custom alert -->
	&nbsp&nbsp~[if.~([Students.U_Info]Alertcustomalert)="1"]<a class="dialogDivC" title="custom alert Student" href="#hiddenDivDialog"><img src="/images/alert_customalertfield.gif"></a>
	<div id="hiddenDivDialog" class="hide">
	<<div class="studentAlert" id="alert-customalert~(studentfrn)">
	<img class="alertImage" src="/images/alert_customalert.gif" />
	<div class="alertContent">
	<p class="alertHeader">~(studentname)</p>
	<p>~([Students.U_Info]Alertcustomalert;if.fieldvalue.1.then=CustomAlert)<br>&nbsp;<br><a href="/admin/students/misc.html?frn=~(studentfrn)"> Other information</a></p>
	</div>
	</div>
	[/if]

view raw title_student_end_css.alert_customalert.student.alert.txt × hosted with ❤ by GitHub

So to get back to the main goal of this post, adding this to the Class Attendance 'Single Entry' tab, is to add the code below to /teachers/classattendance.html directly after '[alerts]' tag, should be line 245 of the original page. It's not elegant but it does work:

	<!-- Start of custom alert-->
	~[tlist_sql;select CASE customalert WHEN 1 THEN '<a class="dialogDivC" title="customalert Student" href="#hiddenDivDialog"><img src="/images/alert_customalert.gif"></a>' ELSE '' END from ps.students s join ps.U_customalertDBextension i on s.DCID = i.STUDENTSDCID join ps.cc cc on cc.STUDENTID = s.ID where cc.id = '[ccid]';]~(studentid;)[/tlist_sql]
	<div id="hiddenDivDialog" class="hide"><div class="studentAlert" id="alert-customalert~(studentfrn)">
	<img class="alertImage" src="/images/alert_customalert.gif" />
	<div class="alertContent"><p class="alertHeader">customalert Student</p></div></div>
	<!-- End of custom alert -->

view raw customalert_teachers_classattendance hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Like I said, it's not elegant and I have not load tested it but it does work in a environment where ~450 teachers login on a daily basis.  It works by using a stored procedure variable called [ccid] that is only available on that page and actually iterates through the listing of students in that class, unfortunately it does not work with a page fragment, for some reason that variable/stored procedure doesn't carry through to the page fragment.  Also other commonly used DATs like ~(studentname) or ~(studentfrn)   don't work.  So I just use a tlist_sql query joining the CC, Students and U_info tables and finding if the student with that [ccid] has a 1 in the customfieldalert, then do a case statement that replaces the value with the html code i want.  Definitely some hackery but like I said it works and teachers are happy.