openIGOR

eForms

2010-10-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

I've updated the code on the demo site, which was getting pretty stale. There's a bunch of new stuff, including eform functionality, which is going to save sooo much work around here. I wrote about it on the other blog here.

LDAP authentication

2009-02-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

openIGOR is up and running at JCSU, and I have gotten LDAP to work with it, so there's a single login solution. That is, IGOR authenticates against the Windows Active Directory database. I also wrote a bulk upload program for users, so that a comma delimited file, from AD for example, can be easily uploaded into the Person table with the correct type.

Bug Fix in igor.pl

2008-02-26T03:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of lines in igor.pl led to buggy behavior, in that sometimes data on the GUI wouldn't update properly, and the organizational tree wouldn't build correctly. Those have been fixed, and the new code package has the updated igor.pl.

Making Years Invisible

2007-06-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

Recent changes include the addition of a configuration variable that allows the IE GUI year selector to be made invisible. You may want to do this if you don't want users to have the power to change to a different year, or to make the report seem not year-specific. A bug was fixed, and a helper function to clean up the database is in there too. The README file has the details.

New Image Available

2007-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

I just uploaded the newest code with all the bug fixes to date. The latest one includes a modification to the GUI that allows commas to be used in group names. Before it was delimiting data items with commas, which would cause a problem. Note that special characters such as & and | should be avoided in unit names. So you may want to call it the @#%#^ Committee, but igor won't be able to parse that yet. The character translations between SQL and CGI are bothersome, and I'll nail it all down eventually. You may find other characters, like accent marks that don't work properly in some of the dialogs.

The GUI has been modified to fix the 'Add Subordinate Unit' drop-down. Now the drop-down box actually works like it should. Before, a long list would scroll off the screen so you couldn't use it.

Finally, the default graphics are correct in this package. I had put some custom ones in the last package by mistake.

Note that if you are upgrading, you want to preserve your config.pl. I do occasionally make changes to that file, but those will be easy to detect by inspection. No changes this time.

End of File Issues

2007-01-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

If you install IGOR and get 'premature end of script headers' or something similar when you try to log in, make sure that the perl files (*.pl) are executable. Then run

./login.pl

to see if that works. If you get errors here, either the perl interpreter isn't at /usr/bin/perl, or you may have DOS end of line characters instead of unix ones on the files. This is easy to do when you use FTP. You can use

dos2unix *.pl
chmod a+x *.pl

to switch them over. That should fix it.

IE Database Bug Fix

2007-01-16T17:15:00.000-08:00

The Actions and Improvements box on the IE interface has a bug in the database. The character limit is set to 45 instead of to TEXT. Here's the SQL to fix it.

ALTER TABLE `IGOR`.`IE_Objectives` MODIFY COLUMN `Improvements` TEXT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

Future Improvements

2006-12-16T05:20:00.000-08:00

I did a short demo of openIGOR at the annual SACS/COC meeting in Orlando to good reception. I shipped out two copies of the virtual machine this week. During the conference I had opportunity to think about opportunities to enhance the software. Here's a short list of possibilities:

Ability to attach budget items to objectives. I had actually built this for our system, but we haven't implemented it yet. I was afraid that it would be biting off too much at once. But I got the clear sense from an IE roundable discussion that it would be a very good thing. Cutting edge, too. I imagine that you could then pull reports by area on budgets as they relate to goals and objectives.
Ability to annotate faculty data with qualifications. Since SACS requires certain standards for teaching in a discipline, it would be a nice addition to have this record-keeping internal to the database.
Ability to pull out strategic plan items as one report. As it is, there is no way to do this without creating your own database query. Actually, it would be nice to have three options: SACS goals, Strategic Plan goals, and ALL goals, as three different reporting options.

I welcome comments on any of the above.

New Source Posted

2006-11-01T19:55:00.000-08:00

The bug fixes and changes noted in the messages below have been uploaded with the new source package. You can find the whole thing at openIGOR.com. Check out the readme and the posts below for changes.

Reports

2006-11-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a link to generate a report for each unit. Ideally, a single link to the president (or root) unit would link to the whole set of reports of units, goals, and objectives, all with the proper style sheet applied. This way you could release the reports without giving access to IGOR. Like for example to an accreditor.

Customizing the Look of the GUI

2006-11-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

The institutional effectiveness graphical user interface (GUI) doesn't have to look like the out-of-the-box IGOR setup. You can change the background color, font, and font color. The /cgi-bin/config/config.pl file now includes lines like these:

# Set Background Color
# use C-type hex notation, like 0xFF0000 for red (0 = zero)
$IEbgcolor = '0xECE9D8';
# set font = Times New Roman, Arial, Courier
$IEfont = "Arial";
# set color of text
$IEtextcolor = '0x666666';

You can try other fonts than the ones listed, but results may vary according to what is loaded on the client machines.

Working with the Org Tree

2006-11-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

If you have used the Create Organizational Tree to set up a year's organization and later find that you need to modify it, here's how to do it.

Adding a new unit If you want to add a new unit node onto the tree, then first create the group from the IGOR administrative screen. Add members to the group. Then go into the GUI, click on the unit that the new one will be subordinate to. Use the Add Subordinate Unit to select the group you created. Click 'Accept' to add it.

Moving a unit If the org chart gets rearranged or you want to move an objective from one goal to another, you need to use an auxillary function accessible only to a system administrator. Telnet to the server, cd to the /cgi-bin/igor directory and run perl IE_move.pl. It will prompt you to enter node numbers. These can be found in angle-brackets in the top left of the GUI window. For example <510>. Unit numbers always end in zero, goals in 1, objectives in 2. You can use this utility to move more than one node at a time. Note that you can easily create illogical arragements, with a unit subordinate to an objective, for example. This isn't recommended.

Copying a node You may want to create a template for an academic unit, consisting of set goals and objectives that are required. Once this is created, you don't want to have to repeat that process for each unit. You can use /cgi-bin/IE_cp.pl instead. The script will prompt for node numbers. A very powerful way to use this is to copy the prior year's goals and objectives (without results) to the new year.

Example To set up a new year that looks like the old one, except for the results and actions part of the objectives (the only part that definitely won't roll over from year to year), do this:

Make sure the years table contains the new year--you'll need to access the table directly in SQL do add it if not. Check out MySQL administrator for a free tool to do this.
Use the Create Organizational Tree to stub a tree for the new year. To do this, delete everything except the root node (normally the President's unit). Be SURE you're on the new year so you don't delete anything important, and create it.
Now have the system administrator copy (using IE_cp.pl) everything under the root node for the expiring year into the new year. The prompts you'll see when you run IE_cp will take care of the details. All you need is the node number of the old root node and the same for the new one. These are easily obtained from the GUI. Click on the unit and look at the number in angle brackets, top left in the report window on the right side.

Bug Fix for Permits

2006-11-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Problem: The group administrators couldn't edit the mission for the group.

Solution: Added the capability. Group administrators will still not be able to DELETE the whole group, thus nullifying their own existance.

Files: The only file affected was /html/IGOR/ie.swf.

SQL Change

2006-11-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

The most recent fixes (see last post) included the ability to lock years. In order to do this I added a column called 'Locked' to the Years table. Here's the code:

ALTER TABLE `IGOR`.`Years` ADD COLUMN `Locked` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER `Current`;

That's a zero, not an oh above. The locked value is 1 for any year that you no longer wish to have IE data entered for on the GUI. It won't affect the file repository--you'll still be able to archive files for prior years (it's always a possibility that someone will finally dig those minutes out and send them up to IGOR).

Fixes and Additions

2006-10-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

Here are some changes from the last few days.

* You can now lock years so that no IE data can be entered for those years
--this entailed adding a boolean column 'Locked' to the Years table

* You can now customize the font and color of headings in the IE interface by tweaking the config.pl file

* Only years that have data show up in the IE interface now. This is determined by whether or not there is an IE_Units row with the 'Root' column set for a given year.

The new zip is up.

Customization

2006-10-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

The background color of the IE interface can now be controlled from IGOR's config file. This was a real problem otherwise, since most people won't want or need to buy Flash. This allows them to match the color to their website without recompiling. It uses Flash's dynamic drawing ability.

I also spent some time making the objective icons look nicer. Now the only color on the tree is the objectives, which have color-coded rings to indicate their completion status.

Note that I didn't spend a lot of time writing fake objectives!

IGOR Gets Some Attention

2006-09-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

Three schools are currently considering IGOR. This is motivated by the need to quickly organize to meet accreditation reporting requirements. I'll be presenting the software to the SACS conference in December too. I meet two groups this week who want to see our setup and we used it in the electronic report for our own compliance certification, as it's called.

Software update

2006-09-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

This weekend I added some new functionality:

Unit administrators can now add and delete members from their unit. They can also set them to administer status and make them invisible.
The icons on the objectives GUI are now color-coded according to the status of the objective. If the plan isn't done yet, it's red. If the plan is done but hasn't been acted it, it's yellow. If it's complete it's blue (blue instead of red so color-blind people can distiguish it from the red.)

I also fixed a couple of minor bugs and added some character translation to help defeat SQL injection attacks.

Alpha Version Released

2006-06-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

I have put a zip package up with the first general release of openIGOR. You can find it at www.openigor.com. I'll be showing it off at the SCICU Institutional Researcher's meeting on Friday. There's still a lot to do, including writing manuals.

I've been trying to get acquainted with the way SourceForge works. I think it may be most useful for tracking bugs, to-dos, and so forth.

A Better GUI

2006-06-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

The code for openIGOR's graphical user interface was such a mess of spaghetti code (in Actionscript) that I almost chucked it and started over. In my defence, it was the first real program I had written in that language. But still. Using the same event handler to service calls from different events is a BAD idea. I have now recoded just about everything. Global variables now look like global.variable, and each call to the CGI interface that talks to the database now has its own object and its own handler. The only problem I wasn't able to solve is this one:

When an onLoad handler is called, it's because some server-side code has returned interesting data for it to look at. A lot of the time that means we need to go to another frame (change pages). But I'd also like to delete the object, since it's no longer needed. So you could do:

object.onLoad = function() { // runs when data loaded
gotoAndPlay("anotherPage");
}

or

object.onLoad = function() { // runs when data loaded
delete object;
}

You can't do both, because if it runs another page it won't see the delete command, and alternatively if it deletes the object there won't be anything left to run the gotoAndPlay. So I'm going to have to trust the garbage collection to clean it up. I know there are message handlers in ActionScript 2.0, which would solve this problem, but I didn't think it was worth the overhead to add that code.

Credit Where Due

2006-05-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

I should have mentioned right off the bat that the original work on this project was done at Coker College in preparation for its 2005 SACS reaccreditation. I got permission from the president to rework it as an open source version. Much of that code had to be rewritten, but the design is largly intact. So kudos to Coker and Pres. Dawson for releasing the original code.

SourceForge

2006-05-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

I signed up today for a sourceforge project, to provide a home for the source for openIGOR. The only snag is that the IE interface part is NOT open source because it relies on commercial libraries from Ghostwire. They have a registration process that takes a few days, so we'll see what happens.

Icon Flags

2006-05-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

On Monday, a review team from SACS will look at our effectiveness plans on the web-based interface that openIGOR derives from. Since we are just this year converting over to a standard format, there's a lot of pain involved (mostly mine) in converting from the old ad hoc reporting methods. So we have hundreds of objectives and not all of them are completed.

I didn't want the SACS folks to have to poke around playing "Where's Waldo?" in order to find what they were looking for, so I thought of a clever way to save them, and me, time. Now when you look at the objectives tree the icons reflect the completion status of the objective. If it's finished (meaning there is text in the Improvements box), the icon appears normally. Otherwise it has a blue line drawn through it. The picture below illustrates.

So now you can tell at a glance who's naughty or nice. I'll be incorporating this into openIGOR too, although I'll let you turn it off if you don't like it. It slows things down a tiny bit since the server has to do more work.

Integrated Goals and Objectives Reporting (IGOR)

2006-05-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

openIGOR is an open-source* project that allows a smallish college to organize its documentation related to attaining goals and objectives. It can be found at openIGOR.com.

The current state of code development will be posted on here, along with (I hope) comments from users.

At this point the code is mostly working, but not ready to release. You can play with the bits that work on the website. Just leave a comment here with your email address, and I'll send you the login info.

The code was originally developed by Coker College, and is being further developed for this project.

*Part of the user interface is coded in Actionscript, and relies on third-party libraries. If you want to modify it, you need a license from the vendor (not me). I've worked out a deal with them, and I don't expect it to be very expensive. This is only a small part of the code, and the rest will be released entirely.