Extracting Ethicity Fields

Spent an hour on extracting the ethnicity fields (which in our case hold passport issuance information i.e. two digit country code [CA] followed by the country name [Canada]). I was trying to find out how Powerschool populates the drop down menu for a custom page that has that has teacher passport country. In the custom HTML for the page there was a tag for the drop down:

<select name="[05]Ethnicity" special="lists.ethnicity">

The Select is pulling from the TEACHERS table [05], but I couldn't figure out how it was populating the list choices from. It turns out that it is coming from the GEN table. The code is selecting form GEN and row where CAT is equal to 'Ethnicity'.

Knowing where that data was kept, I then opened excel up and connected to the GEN table through an ODBC connection to the Powerschool database. I filtered the data where CAT = 'Ethnicity and selected the NAME and VALUE columns.. the SQL is:

SELECT GEN.NAME, GEN.VALUE, GEN.CAT

FROM PS_MGMT.GEN GEN

WHERE (GEN.CAT='ethnicity')

I was then able to dump it right into Excel

My powerschool Introduction

I guess the purpose of this is to share my experiences with my transition from Rediker's Admin + to Powerschool.

Last year I was working at Seoul Foreign School and Using Rediker's Admin + (and was not a big fan). This school year I took a new job as the network administrator at the American School of Doha. The school is in their second year of implementation, and I replaced the previous Powerschool administrator.

So far I have been very happy with using Powerschool (note to Rich Rediker: Relational databases are the way to go. People have been using them for a while. It's time to move to this "new" technology.).

I went to the Powerschool University this summer and it is a great program It probably would have been better if I had had a little experience with Powerschool before I went. I plan on attending again this summer.

I jumped in with both feet when I arrived at school, rolled over the new school year, and spent many hours on with Powerschool tech support.