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Student pictures in Course Home Page

Wed, 2008-06-18 15:47 — tulio
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Hi, we're almost alive with Luminis IV (next August is the deadline).
The academic departments at our Institution would like to have the students pictures in every Course Home Page.

Photos can be uploaded manually but we would like to automate this task.

Has anybody deal with this?

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Tue, 2008-07-08 16:26 — tgalanis

I believe it is possible

If you login to your Luminis RDBMS and look for a table called GT_PHOTO

PHOTO_ID GROUP_ID USER_ID PHOTO_TITLE PHOTO_EXTENSION PHOTO_CAPTION
1000 1002 409757701968637 test jpg Test Caption
PHOTO_CAPTION_FORMATTED PHOTO_CAPTION_HAS_HTML DATE_CREATED GT_STATUS
Test Caption N 6/19/2008 7:47:08.000000 PM A

And then login to your luminis box and notice the correlation between GT_PHOTO and the shared directory structure.

$CP_ROOT/products/luminis/shared/groupdata/photo/1002

drwxr-xr-x 2 lumadmin luminis 512 Jun 19 19:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 lumadmin luminis 512 Jun 19 19:49 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 lumadmin luminis 4091 Jun 19 19:49 1000.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 lumadmin luminis 1522 Jun 19 19:49 1000-tn.jpg

As long as the mapping are correct and you update the DB while the portal is down it should recognize the mappings, there are no triggers on these tables. I would search your LDAP for the GroupID and PhotoID and see if that needs updating as well.

Wed, 2008-07-09 12:30 — tulio

Student Pictures

Thank you four your help, we'll try this solution in our test environment.

Tulio Fabricio Escobar Ruiz.
Coordinador de Sistemas de Informacion.
Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico

Mon, 2008-06-23 16:08 — gskinner

some info

At my old place of employment, I was able to get this working. I don't have any of the code anymore, but here was the basic rundown.

1.) We had all the photos stored in a campus LDAP server, using the jpegPhoto attribute (different from the luminis LDAP, but you could use luminis's if you wanted)
2.) homegrown php app that was cpip'ed. Basically it was the url of the app with a ?uid=username, it also only returned an image, not an html doc.
3.) I edited the xslt file for the members page in the course/group tools areas. The call for the username already existed in the xslt so I really only had to add an extra column to the table with a img link to the php script.

Sorry I don't have any code for this anymore, but I think York College of PA still uses it....
Greg

Tue, 2008-07-08 11:34 — soasam

Couple thoughts...

First... if you are going to store the images in a directory as you said then I would be careful to:

1) Don't store all the files in a single big directory. This can dramatically slow down filesystem performance. At the very least do something like organize them into sub-directories based on the first letter of the file name so that soasam.jpg would be stored as s/soasam.jpg. This will help performance dramatically. Honest.

2) Be sure you put a proper backup policy in place. I know this sounds a bit didactic, but often times we have backups in place for big things like the DB and LDAP but forget to put a backup in place for "databases" on the filesystem.

3) Be sure to research your Privacy Policy and legal requirements. I know this is a big issue at some schools. It may a good idea to make sure students have the ability to control whether or not their photo is visible to anyone who doesn't absolutely need it (security, their prof, etc.). Once you've established that, it should help you determine the appropriate level of security you'll need to have in place.

As the other poster mentioned, though, it may be a good idea to store this data in your LDAP repository or maybe even in your Luminis DB. Both Oracle and SQL Server can handle BLOB storage. The benefit you get there is that the DB usually will store this info efficiently, and you are already probably backing up the DB/LDAP.

Also... Since you are looking for some more automation... At Villanova I know students can upload their own photos and then they are reviewed. This is part of the campus card program. So, if you don't have a webcam on your computer you just go to the campus card office and they'll do it there. Once you upload your photo there, it finds its way onto the course photo sheets that profs get at the beginning of the semester.

HTH

Wed, 2008-07-09 12:37 — tulio

Student Pictures

Thank you for your comments, I believe they are extremely important.

I'll have them in mind.

Tulio Fabricio Escobar Ruiz.
Coordinador de Sistemas de Informacion.
Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico