There was a bug that was causing the generated roster files to not be sorted in the proper order. In fact the records were being returned from the database in random order. The resulting pdf files looked pretty š but were not in phone directory order. This bug has now been fixed. The roster files now have two sort levels applied. Initially all Head of Household (HoH) records are selected from the database and sorted in Last Name order. Then for each HoH record, all family records are selected and ordered in descending age order.
Tag Archives: Roster Creator
Tutorial: Signing up for a new account
This tutorial will walk you through the process of signing up for a new account and verifying the email to activate the account. You will need a valid email account where you can receive the verification email before proceeding with this tutorial.
Visit http://roster.1844.net/. Please note there is no www at the beginning of the URL.
Now click on the Register button in the upper right hand corner of the screen to load the registration form and fill out the form with your information. Please verify that you have entered a valid email address before submitting the form.
Once you’ve filled out the form and have entered a valid email address click on the “Register Now” button. The next screen will just confirm that your registration has been accepted and remind you to check your inbox for theĀ verificationĀ email. TheĀ warningĀ about not being logged in is a reminder that you will need to login before proceeding.
Now we need to jump into our email inbox and find the verification email that was sent to your account. It will look similar to the email pictured here. Once you find it, simply click on the link in the email. If your email client does not allow you to click on the link directly, simply copy the link and paste it into a browser window.
And finally when you click on the verification link and everything goes according to plan you should see the following screen letting you know that your account has been activated. You can now login using the email and password you used during the registration process.
Begin Roster Creator
I had some time during the Memorial Weekend holiday and decided to sit down and do some coding. One of the projects on my list of things to do, has been to pull together some scripts that I’ve created over the years for generating nicely formated community rosters based on the National eMembership system.
Several years ago I took over the maintenance of our communities roster. As the time we had one list that was maintained for the printed roster, another that was used for the phone tree system, yet another that was used annually for printing ballots, and all these were separate from the list maintained by National. One of the first things I did was to standardize on the National list as the source for all the other lists we used.
This forced us to proactively clean up the National list and keep it clean. Once I made the decision to use the eMembership system as the source, I began to use export files from this system and write merge letters and form for generating our printed roster and annual ballots and such.
Eventually this process became streamlined enough that my scripts were not changing much and had become pretty stable. I eventually got the idea to try to pull my scripts together and create a site that others could use to benefit from my scripts. This weekend was when I finally got a chance to realize this dream.
I began coding a site using an open source project I’m involved with called CFWheels. It is a port of the Rails project to the CFML language and runs on the Adobe ColdFusion engine as well as the open source Railo engine.
Saturday and Sunday were spent building the framework of the application and creating the basic login, signup, password recovery systems. By Monday I was ready to start working on the actual PDF generation scripts. I pulled most of that together and wanted to get others into the system to kick the tires and get feedback. So I started to get ready to invite a handfull of users from the surrounding communities to test the system.
So I published the code on one of my domains and the eMembership Roster Creator system was born.