Idea for IOS app to work with Filemaker. Possible? - filemaker

I created a database using filemaker and long story short the database is for Janitors. All they have to do is choose yes or no from a drop down list or choose 1 2 3 for the type of task that is done. Now here is what my boss's idea is. He wants to make QR(or bardcodes, not sure which works) codes for each restroom in the school. They will just be a number. Now there will be 3 other QR codes with options 1 2 3 (cleaned, restocked, deep clean). His idea is to make an app that reads the QR codes and perform a find and input the restroom number. Now after its in the correct restroom they scan the other QR code and it inputs what type of task was done depending on the one that was scanned.
Here it is in steps:
1.Scan the code that is the restroom number(will open FM then add a new record in filemaker with the restroom number)
2.Scan the other code which will be the type of restroom and set the field for the type of task done.
Is this idea possible?

Yes this is possible, though I would adjust your approach and add some detail.
Searching for room by barcode
I think this section of the idea is a good one. You could do this with either qr codes or a different barcode type. Here's an article by Greg Lane that talks about Using Barcodes with FileMaker Go (Full disclosure: I work for Skeleton Key).
What you would want to do is to write a script that does the following when clicking on a "Find Room" button or some other trigger:
Enter's find mode
Goes to a layout that has the Room Number field that holds the room numbers that you'd be searching through
Uses the Insert from Device
Specify that it's a barcode you want to scan and give it the type you want to scan
Use your Room Number field as the target field (This will tell FileMaker to translate what was scanned into text and put it into that text field)
Perform Find
This is a super simplified outline of the script you'd want to write. When you actually write it you would also want to add in error capturing and any other changes to make it fit your need.
Barcode Generation
The portion that you need to add into your plan is how you're going to generate and print the barcodes you're going to use. If you already have a way of printing barcodes than this is a moot point, but if you don't you can print them directly from the Room records in your FileMaker database.
Todd Geist wrote a nice blog on Printing Barcodes with FileMaker that will be helpful. Also, if you have access to this year's (2014) DevCon videos you could watch the session for Super Charging your Workflows with Barcodes by Greg Lane.
Scanning a barcode for Task
This is the one I would change. Searching for a room number with a barcode is a good idea because:
The barcode to scan lives in a specific place (at each room door)
It would be "more difficult" to manually search for the room number than it would to scan a barcode and let the app do the search
In the case of a task to be completed though, I think the barcode scanning to mark the task that was done will actually be more cumbersome.
First, you would need to have the barcodes for each somewhere that the user could scan it to mark the specific task complete. This means your user needs to either carry the barcodes with them or you need to post them at each room location. Neither is convenient.
Second, if there are only 3 tasks they could complete and the user is already on the room record from scanning the room number barcode, then it would be easier for both them and you as the developer to put 3 buttons on the layout for a room that correspond to each task they could complete.
Adding in barcode scanning for completing a task would be adding in an extra layer of complication that isn't really needed.
Overall flow
In the end, I think your idea is a good one and one that I've programmed in one form or the other many many times. I think the overall flow you want (which is very close to what you already had) is:
Print out the barcodes for the rooms and place the codes at the door of each room
Build a "Scan to find room" structure into your application
Once the user find's the room, have a button for each task they could complete
Hope this helps!

Related

Is there a way to permanently add a box displaying points of students in the navbar

So I am working on a project that awards points to students for submitting assignments or participating in forums, these points are then exposed as an Http resource using Flask.
The points are calculated by looking at the events triggered for each student.
One of the requirements right now is to add a box next to the student's name that shows the total amount of points they have. I have two ways of accessing the points, either by an http request from moodle or by storing and retrieving the points from moodle's database.
My question is what is the best approach of creating this "box", I have tried using moodle blocks and hacking the code but nothing seems to be working. Is creating a plugin for this the only solution or is there a simpler way to do it (if it is even possible)?
To answer your question properly you should have provided at least the theme and the Moodle version you work with. Should this box be displayed everywhere? Is the score calculated for every course individually?
Two proposals that came into my mind:
You could create a custom plugin of type block. There you can display the score of the user of the session and the top ten for example (If the score is calculated for each course individually). A disadvantage is that every teacher of a course could remove that block easily, if he or she wants to.
If the score counts system-wide you could put that box at the start page of your Moodle website, where only people with higher rights will be able to remove it.
If you use boost you could display the score in the navbar right next to the users name. For that you will have to create a new child theme of boost and overwrite navbar.mustache of theme_boost which get's it's information from columns2.php because it's included into columns2.mustache. In this PHP file you can include your logic and display it with the HTML which you put into navbar.mustache.
Of course these are not really simple ways to do that. But at the moment I doubt that an easy solution exists for this problem.

Go to a record from a portal

I'm making an app for authors using Filemaker. I posted this question on their forum but still haven't gotten an answer.
My app is basically a place where people can keep track of all the details that go into creating characters and locations. In each book (record) I have a tab control with 4 tabs: Book Details, Character List, Location List and Group List. Within the character list tab I have a portal which shows a list of the characters for that book.
I'm trying to create a button for each row in the portal which takes me to that records details page (the one with the red box around it). Right now, it's set to go to the character details layout. However, whichever row I click on, it takes me to the last visited record. Is there a way to go to each row's record from the portal? If not, do you know of a way to do the same thing through another method? I have a list layout which I used before, however, it doesn't hide the records for different books. For example, if I select book 1, it still shows characters for book 2. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!
Create a button, attach a script or single command that uses the Go To Related Record script step using the same relationship as the portal.
Make sure the button fits within the row.

Create a Google Form (or similar) that verifies Student ID before submission

Context:
I teach at a university with mostly monolingual, English-speaking teachers, and students with mostly Russian and Kazakh names.
I want to create a simple form (like this https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zo0vSfrH-xIosENy1wVjOd_VvPL5LL6UX6g4VqIPFn0/viewform ) that would keep track of reports of plagiarism on a Google Sheet (like this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h2nAvCq31xumi4SvjMvWWp8RR7ppJ_NtLCiuvrLqVkc/edit?usp=sharing )
Having the English speaking teachers type in Russian and Kazakh names would likely lead to mistakes. There are too many students at the university to choose them from a drop-down menu, and would be too many teachers and courses to create separate Google Forms for all of them, or to use Google's branching page choices (it would require creating hundreds of pages). So I would like instructors to be able to type in the Student ID # and their own Instructor ID #, and then have some way to verify that they have typed that information in correctly (so we don't have the wrong students being penalized, or penalties that don't get assigned to any student at all).
Questions:
1. Is there any possible way (via scripting, an add-on, etc.) to have Google Forms take the Student ID from Page 1, then look up the student's name on the Student Info tab of the Google Sheet and insert it into the text field on the second page of the Google form, so the instructor can verify it's the correct student? (Or any other technique anyone can think of that would allow a Google Form user to verify that they had entered the correct data, or help manage the massive number of choices of students in a university of several thousand students.)
If (as I'm afraid), there is no way to do it with Google Forms, can anyone suggest a Form creation platform that would do something like this, and that would integrate with Google Sheets or something similar?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
If you are open to doing it differently I'd go this route...
1) Use a short answer box and allow edits to answers.
2) Put the onSubmit() trigger into the sheet. When a submission comes in, send a follow up email to the person with the ID that they typed and the student name that it corresponds to. Let them know that no action is required if that is correct. If it isn't correct, they should edit their response with the edit response link which you can get using getEditResponseUrl(). I'd call it done right here and only worry about additional features if they are needed. It isn't as ideal as verifying at the time but would get the same thing done for people that can't keep their IDs straight. :-)
3) But... if you have people that keep messing up and they don't fix their issues or whatever, add a link in the email to confirm that the entry is accurate. If it isn't then a weekly/daily task runs that deletes any entries that haven't been confirmed and are older than Y days.
4) Alternately, instead of verifying what they type, give them drop down lists made up of a combination of student ID and name. I'd have multiple lists, depending on the number of active students. One or many though, make a script in the sheet that updates the dropdowns in the form either on edit or by manually running the script, either from a menu item or by attaching it to an icon on the page where the IDs/names are at. They should see 12345 - Joe Smith as the option and can find the right one if that student name doesn't match the ID they thought they should use.
I have a script like #4 that I use to populate a form with updated products whenever the list changes. I tied it to a big red button JPG to help the end users remember to run it when they change something, as a menu option didn't work and running every time there was an edit was too much.
If you list of students/IDs also includes the teachers/classes/etc you could even do custom forms for each staff member that uses the form that only populates their students. Not sure how many staff you have so that might not be practical. Though again, once you have the script and the data is accurate, updates are a single click.

Barcoding in Ms Access

I'm trying to set up barcoding for inventory in access but i've hit a brick wall with formulas. I'm using a split form that pulls all the items at one facility (this is using a query), with the item details on top and a datasheet on the bottom. What I need to do when I scan the barcode (Barcode scan just sends a number and then hits enter):
Show the item in question, Check off the item (in the scanned field) then at the top have it count the number of items to scan compared to the total number of items.
this is my database
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g74f12f7ca2e5574c999399633d9019b01b77824ed
This is the last step for me in this database, and I've never had ANY formal training so I'm really in a bind here. Thank you all so much.
please refer to the software development guide of your scanner for better understanding. there's an SDK for motorola barcode scanners and POS for.net for any brand of scanner. If you tried POS for .net, they have a sample app where the simulated scanner sends the barcode info in a textbox(inside a form) which you can manipulate to save in a database.

I want to be able to search an html page that is refreshing every 10 seconds for the word "stat"

I want to be able to search an html page that is refreshing every 10 seconds for the word "stat". If the word is found I then want to alert the user through a pop up dialog and possibly a repeating sound until the user acknowledges it.
UPDATE:
Sorry the question was a bit ambiguous. I do not know a great deal about this stuff I just do it as a hobby.
OK so here is the deal. I work as Biomedical Electronics Technician for a hospital. We have a work order system that is web based. Nurses can enter a work order into this system. I have a browser window open at all times that refreshes periodically through an add-on for IE so I can always be up to date on the status of the work orders coming in. When a nurse the enters enters a work order they have the option of choosing Stat, High, Medium, or Low for the priority. When a stat work order is placed our response time should be within five minutes theoretically. I want some way to alert myself when a stat work order has been placed so I can respond accordingly. And I know a repeating sound would be annoying, but that might be the best way to get my attention.
Another caveat to this is the work order status can be changed by me, the tech. So when a work order is initially placed the status is Not assigned or something like that. Once I go start on a work order I change the status to In Progress. If I have to order a part I change the status to Hold for Parts, etc. So basically, what I am saying is I don't want to alerted if the status is anything but "Not assigned". If it will help I will get a copy of the source of the page when I get to work tomorrow.
Our IT department seems unwilling to help and the company that made the product is so busy chasing the daily bugs that show up to add new features such as this at this time. If I knew more a Google search might help, but alas I am a bit noobish in the programming realm, however I am 2 years from a C.S. degree so I am not a complete novice.
To answer another question, I do not have access to the page I am just viewing it so any sort of script would need to run on my client machine.
Thanks
I found this, try it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3028/
Maybe it can search for STAT on the entire page?
Based off your description, it doesn't sound like you have access to the server to change the code of the page itself, correct?
If that's the case, spend some time learning how to use Greasemonkey (or rather Greasemonkey for IE). It allows you to add functionality to a web page from the client (browser) side, regardless of what's on the server.
You'll need to find the elements that hold the "stat" term your after, and have it check periodically those elements periodically. Look into the setTimeout method for that periodicity. The rest you'll have to work out specific to that page.
What you're looking for, since you have python available, is to build a simple, easy to use webscraper.
First link is how i would do it quick and dirty.
http://www.ehow.com/how_4436125_read-web-page-using-python.html
Second link is a bit more robust and nifty with BeautifulSoup
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/python/soa/Build-a-basic-Web-scraper-in-Python/0,2000064084,339281476,00.htm
Basically, read the page (even set the whole loop on a 10 second refresh timer).
Go line by line with a while readline loop.
See if one of your magic words exists with a regular expression
...
profit?
(... meaning do your alert song and dance)
(profit being rejoice!)