Centre SIS

Is their a way to imput data into a excel sheet, and then upload it into the database? Like i would fill out all the information for students, upload the excel workbook, and then all the student data be their.

There are ways to import CSV files into postgres but you would have to understand the centre internals to know how to organize your data in multiple tables with proper linkages. I am not aware of a centre specific tool to do this for you. This might be a professional service offered by the miller group.

To do this you want to first enter a few student records through the centre interface then inspect the centre database to see where the information went. This is essentially what I did when we adopted centre several years ago.

Matt

So Matt, could you explain the export & import process. Forget the specifics of the data involved. I am new to postgres.

The centre database is not a simple two dimensional datastructure like a single spreadsheet. A single table in a postgres database is comparable to a single spreadsheet. The centre database is made up of many tables, and additional tables which link the information together. The main tables for student information are

students
address
people
students_join_address
students_join_people
people_join_contacts

You can create custom fields for students and address and people - these create additional columns to the corresponding tables.

There are gobs of other tables for attendance, grades, etc - these are just basic student inf, and I might have missed some.

So if you enter some students then look at these tables, that will give you an idea of how the information is represented. If you can export your old data to a bunch of different CSV files corresponding to each of these tables you can then import the data to postgres. The trick is getting it all linked up in the _join_ tables.

There are plenty of sources on the web which describe the mechanics of importing CSV to postgres. If you are already faimiliar with any SQL then postgres should come pretty easy.

For our school, I went through the above exercise. Then I exported our school data to one big CSV file and used a very powerful text editor (Brief in my case, but there are others) to convert the CSV file into a bunch of postgres COPY statements. Then I would import the data and look at it from within Centre to see how hat worked, and iterated until it was right - it took several tries. It helps to establish conventions - for example, I made the address_id of the student's address the same as his/her student_id - then linking them through the _join_ table was trivial.

Matt