The ITS FIT (Faculty Instructional Technology) Center is a great place for San Diego State University Faculty to learn and use Learning Technologies, like OMR machines and classroom response tools.
Tracking why Faculty come to the FIT Center can help to improve the services and support they receive. This is where the FIT Welcome Console can help. Running a web-enabled device, like a desktop or tablet, guests can check in, providing statical tracking, as well as notifications in certain cases.
We also use Acuity Scheduling to manage ParScore appointments. FIT Welcome integrates with Acuity to streamline the check-in process for faculty who have already made appointments. Faculty can also schedule appointments directly from within the Welcome Console.
FIT Welcome also includes various staff tools, including...
- Clock In/Out capabilities for Hourly Employees
- Reporting Tools for User and Staff Activity
- Live Activity - Visit /live and enter a staff ID to view.
FIT Welcome is written primarily in Java and is run using the TomCat framework to run the WebSites. A MySQL DB is used to store user information, as well as log events and clock in/out times.
FollowUp is an integrated module that will prompt recent visitors to provide feedback on the service that they received with a given schedule, like at the end of every day (or whenever you like) that sends a follow up email with a survey link to users who have visited within the last X days. There is also a param to limit the number of emails a user gets.
- Param:
followup_enable- Enables the Job that check for eligible events and send emails to the respective parties - Param:
followup_schedule- A CRON String that determines the schedule that Follow Up messages will be sent. - Param:
followup_freshness- Within how many days to contact the users. For example a value of 3 would mean to contact those who have visited in the last 3 days. - Param:
followup_max- The minimum number of days since the user was last emailed. For Example a value of 7 would mean that a user who visits every day would only get an email every 7 days.
Alerts is an integrated module that will send an alert to all users who are still clocked-in at the time that the job is run. This is intedned to be run at the end of the business day to alert cockable staff who forgot to clock out – as staff who are not clocked-out will not be able to clock-in the next day.
- Param:
alerts_enable- Enables the Job that reminds clocked-in users of their status - Param:
alerts_schedule- A CRON String that determines the schedule that Alert messages will be sent.
Blackboard can be integrated to sync Users who have a Numerical Student ID, external ID, or Username with your Users Table in the DB.
For generating CRON Schedules for Quartz Scheduler, the Job Agent that has been implemented, https://www.freeformatter.com/cron-expression-generator-quartz.html may come in very useful, since Quartz implements a unix-like format, but it is slightly different and strings are not cross compatible between crontab and Quartz.
- Full Param List is below!
FIT Welcome also uses Vault to access credentials for various tools and services (DataBase, APIs, Email, etc.)
Locales allow for different kiosks to show different options based on the URL parameter, locale. The default local can be set by modifying renderMap.js in webapps/js, and changing the defaultLocale constant at the top of the file. The default is set to FIT by default.
The locales folder in webapps houses all of the sitemaps, as well as assets for every locale. The name of the folder is the name of the locale that will be used by the Web Interface. Each folder should contain apple-touch-icon.png, logo.png, and sitemap.json.
To setup the various tables that FIT Welcome uses, run the code below in the Database that will be used with FIT Welcome.
- users is where all Primary Users (Faculty, TAs, etc.) should be stored.
- clock is used to store Clock In/Out events.
- events stores all check-in information, as well as any additional information that is relevant to that check-in.
- quotes stores a list of quotes that are displayed on the confirmation pages. These quotes can be anything you like! (A good source for quotes is Brainy Quote).
- staff stores information for all staff users.
- meeting saves the values that should be saved in the event log for each Acuity Appointment Type. These values are set in the Admin Panel.
- emails is used by the FollowUp module to track who was sent emails when.
Important Note: information in the staff table has priority over information in the users table; this is done to allow normal users to be changed to staff users without the need to remove them from the primary users table.
Run the below commands in both your production and testing/staging databases.
CREATE TABLE dsk (
`PK` INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
`name` TEXT
);
INSERT INTO dsk (`name`) VALUES ('EXTERNAL');
CREATE TABLE department (
`PK` INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
`name` TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE users
(
id INT(9) NOT NULL
PRIMARY KEY,
first_name TEXT NULL,
last_name TEXT NULL,
email TEXT NULL,
send_emails TINYINT(1) DEFAULT '1' NULL,
dsk INT NULL,
department INT NULL,
updated TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOT NULL,
FOREIGN KEY (dsk) REFERENCES dsk (PK),
FOREIGN KEY (department) REFERENCES department (PK)
);
CREATE TABLE clock
(
id INT(9),
time_in TIMESTAMP,
time_out TIMESTAMP DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL
);
CREATE TABLE events
(
ID int(9) PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
TIMESTAMP TIMESTAMP DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL,
redid INT(9),
action TEXT,
params TEXT,
FOREIGN KEY (redid) REFERENCES users (id)
);
CREATE TABLE quotes
(
id INT(9) PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
text TEXT,
author TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE staff
(
id INT(9) PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
first_name TEXT,
last_name TEXT,
email TEXT,
clockable TINYINT(1),
admin TINYINT(1),
instructional_designer TINYINT(1)
);
CREATE TABLE meetings (
`acuity_id` INT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
`event_text` TEXT,
`event_params` TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE email
(
TIMESTAMP TIMESTAMP DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL,
ID int(9),
TYPE TEXT
);
INSERT INTO users VALUES (999999999, 'WalkIn', 'User', 'nobody@blackboard.sdsu.edu', 0);Run the set of commands below in your testing/staging database in addition to the commands listed above.
INSERT INTO users VALUES (100000001, 'Test', 'User', 'unique_email@blackboard.sdsu.edu', 1);
INSERT INTO staff VALUES (123456789, 'Test', 'Staff', 'staff@blackboard.sdsu.edu', 1, 0, 0);
INSERT INTO staff VALUES (123123123, 'Test', 'Admin', 'admin@blackboard.sdsu.edu', 0, 1, 0);In order to interface with Blackboard and it's REST API, you will need to be running Blackboard LEARN version 3000 or higher. Additionally, you will need to regsiter with the Blackboard Developer site, and create an application in order to obtain an Application ID, Application Key, Application Secret. Make note of these, especially the Secret, as they are only shown once and you will need to save them in the Vault (described below). Once you have your application ID, you will need to authorize the application with Blackboard. You can do this by going into the Blackboard Administrator Panel, then going into "REST API Integrations" and Creating an Integration. Enter the Application ID you obtained earlier and you should be good to go.
You will need to create two secrets in the vault, one that will have the information for your production system, the other with your testing configuration. Information on how to setup Vault and AppRoles can be found at: https://sdsu-its.gitbooks.io/vault/content/
The name of the app that you want to use needs to be set as the WELCOME_APP environment variable.
You will also need to set the VAULT_ADDR, VAULT_ROLE and VAULT_SECRET environment variables to their corresponding values.
alert_enable= Enables Non-Clock Out Email Alert Messagesalert_schedule= CRON Schedule for Non-Clock Out emailsbb-API-secret= Name of the Secret with the Blackboard Application Credentialsbb-url= Blackboard URLsyncEnable= Enable/Disable (T/F) Blackboard SyncsyncFrequency= How often the Sync Job should run (30s recommended)db-password= Database Passworddb-url= jdbc:mysql://db_host:3306/db_name replace db_host, db_name and possibly the port with your MySQL server infodb-user= Database Usernamefollowup_enable= Enables Follow Up Survey Emailsfollowup_schedule= CRON Schedule for Follow Up Survey Emails to be sentfollowup_freshness= The maximum amount of time since the user's last visit to email the userfollowup_max= The minimum number of days between emailsfollowup_survey_link= Survey Link for the User, use the string{{ event_id }}to fill in the Event ID. Example: [http://www.bing.com/images/search?q={{ event_id }}](http://www.bing.com/images/search?q={{ event_id }})followup_unsubscribe= Unsubscribe Link, use{{ email }}to substitute the email. Example: [http://your_domian_with_context/followup/unsubscribe.html?email={{ email }}](http://your_domian_with_context/followup/unsubscribe.html?email={{ email }})
Make sure that at least the db_name is different than your production settings.
db-password= Database Passworddb-url= jdbc:mysql://db_host:3306/db_name replace db_host, db_name and possibly the port with your MySQL server infodb-user= Database Username
Create an additional application with the email credentials.
hostpostusernamepasswordfrom_emailfrom_name
Finally, create a fourth application with the Acuity Scheduling configuration information.
User IDAPI Key
You will need to create a Blackboard Application, with the Blackboard Developer Site, as described above. Save the various values that you got during the application creation process as the following values in the Vault respectively.
applicationIDkeysecret