I mentioned a couple posts ago that we were overhauling flash messages in the web app: Spiffy New Flash Messages! We've now completed that effort. The most noticeable change is that messages will no longer auto-hide and they'll be "stuck" to the top of the window instead of stuck to the top of the page. This means they'll always be visible regardless of how you've scrolled or how long ago they were displayed. So now when a message first display, it might look like this:

I apologize in advance for this post being a little extra geeky. If you prefer the posts with pretty pictures and screenshots to look at, this would be a good time to scroll back through some of the ones you've missed in the past.

There's been a good bit of spiffication (spiffifying?) going on with the web app over the past year or so, and there will be quite a bit more coming up as we find time to fit it in. One of the latest is a rework of all the things that we call "flash" messages throughout the app. Flash messages are the little informational messages that show up at the top of the page to indicate the outcome of some process or request. For example, when you add a new student to a list from the Search page, you used to get a flash message like this:

We've had for a few years in MIS2000 the ability to send out emails to people about events that have happened in the system. The earliest example of this is the "COEs Needing Attention" email that looks like this:

We've used a variety of methods over the years to control which users can edit which enrollments and so forth, but bringing Michigan on over the past year presented some challenges because they already had a lot of processes that worked well for them but weren't in line with anything we'd ever done in MIS2000. One of these was the ability to lock enrollments for an entire school year from editing by anyone. I'm always a little amazed when something like this comes up because I don't think anyone across all these years in all these states has ever asked for that. And yet it seems like something lots of folks would want.

Some of you may have noticed our spiffy new menu in the web app that looks like this:

States have varying needs about which Enrollments should be displayed on the Student page in the web app. There are states who show all enrollments for a student and states that only show the most recent enrollment for a student. Some states have altered which enrollments they display based upon the Role of the User. Just to make clear which part of the app I'm talking about, here's a screenshot:

If you're not already up to speed about how Student Lists work in the web app, you can look at this post for an overview. So thanks to the gals in the Minnesota MEP, we have a new Student List feature - exporting to Excel. You can access it from the Student List menu on the Search page like this:

Snapshots in MIS2000 give you the ability to "freeze" your database, reports, and really just the whole MIS2000 system at a point in time. You'll be able to revisit the snapshot later and get exactly the same reports and data you did when you made it. Marcy did a blog post on the functionality here. Snapshots are the latest bit of functionality to be made available in the new app. You can get to the under the "More" menu like so:

This blog post may leave lots of people saying something like, "We have deletes management?" But yes, you do. Although you may not have ever used it and have no need to. It depends on how your state is set up. The smaller states with a simpler configuration often have no need to manage deletes of COEs and Students. In those states, everyone who can do it is also authorized to do it, so managing them is a non-issue. But in the more complex states, there's often a need to let users delete a COE or Student without its actually being deleted. In these cases, the deletes flow up to the state level as a "delete request". They're still pretty rare, so an email goes out once a month alerting the state admins if they have any to review.