A lot of people arrive at my blog looking for information about FreeMIS. If that’s you, this post should provide you with an up-to-date picture of FreeMIS.

FreeMIS is working for me at North Berwick High School, providing the following functions: reporting to parents; positive referrals; progress tracking and target setting; unexpected absence notifications.

FreeMIS is easy to use once it has been set up, but it is a fairly technical job to get FreeMIS up and running on a web server, and there is not much documentation to help you.

As a bare minimum, you would need to know how to get a Ruby on Rails application running on a web server (FreeMIS runs on Rails 1.2.2), be familiar with MySQL and be able to use a tool like Phpmyadmin to populate pupil tables (as FreeMIS does not have a front end tool to enter new pupils other than by doing it one at a time!)

If you can manage that, you will find FreeMIS to be a great tool. Teachers at my school are very happy with it.

If you manage to get FreeMIS up and running, I would be very interested to hear from you.

I am not actively developing FreeMIS now. I make the occasional tweak to suit the needs of my school, but I have pretty much given up on the idea that it might ever provide a comprehensive alternative to the commercial MIS systems.

If you are looking for such an alternative, I suggest that you have a look at SchoolTool or ClaSS.

It’s now officially on my to-do list!  Anyone impatient for the latest code can always download it from the subversion repository

I am so please with myself! For nigh on a year now, I have been aware of a potential problem with FreeMIS (the Ruby-on-Rails based  management information system for schools that I have developed) and today I solved that problem.

The problem is that the printing of a full set of reports for all the pupils in a year group is a huge task, which can take Rails anything up to 130 seconds to complete. By the time it has done this, the browser and or web server have got bored and given up waiting. I have played around with the configuration of Apache and FastCGI, and tried using mongrel instead, but none managed to fix the problem 100%.

In PHP, it would be easily solved by purging the data produced out to the browser repeatedly through the task, but Rails does not have this option.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I realised that I could solve the problem by doing the reports one pupil at a time!

Obvious, you might think, but the system needs a “one-click” solution for printing all the reports for a register class – it would not be acceptable to require user input to print out each individual pupil’s reports.

What I realised last night was that if I did the printing of reports via Ajax and RJS, then I get exactly what I wanted.

I start by submitting a form via Ajax to print the reports for a register class.

The action renders the reports for the first pupil in the register class at the bottom of the relevant div, then puts a hidden variable into the form, with the id of the next pupil in the register class. It then tells the browser to “click” on the submit button of the form. All the reports for the register class then come out, pupil by pupil, and no individual browser<->server cycle lasts more than a couple of seconds, so no chance of timing out. I can even put a percentage progress bar at the top of the page. Happy happy joy joy

Robert Jones' (sic) FreeMIS, developed with Ruby-on-Rails,
had come from a different direction - based on the need to
report to parents. As it is currently used in Scotland, it
uses Shibboleth for single sign-on. (c) R Smedley

Shibboleth SSO for FreeMIS is actually “in development”, but apart from that it’s all true
The article has a link to the demo site – this explains the recent spike in visits to the demo.

It began when I arrived at North Berwick High School, and took on a whole school IT role. The school needed a report writing solution, so I made one, using the most readily available tool in school – Filemaker Pro. I didn’t know much about databases, and taught myself as I went along. This solution caught the attention of East Lothian Council, and I then spent some time on a working group that put together a solution for reporting and target setting. This was based on my previous work, and Dave Rawson did the target setting side. This solution was picked up by most of the high schools in East Lothian. I soon realised, though, that maintaining 6 different versions of a Filemaker Pro database and trying to apply upgrades to them was a complete nightmare. I needed an solution that kept data and application separate, and a means of keeping physically remote versions of the application synchronised with any upgrades made centrally. At this stage I had no idea that these problems had already been solved by others before me.

Meanwhile, I became a masterclasser, and was given a laptop to use. By some wierd quirk of the purchasing and issue of these laptops, I was given full admin rights to the machine. This contrasts dramatically with the normal situation in East Lothian, where I don’t have any rights to install software or customise settings at all. I took full advantage of these rights, and installed Mandrake Linux as a dual boot with windows on the machine.

This was the moment of revelation. Suddenly I had an operating system that was designed by the developers of open source software, and was therefore perfectly set up to facilitate such development. I played around and realised that what I needed was a web based application. I also discovered the wonders of version control. All (!!) I had to do was set up a database on a web server and then write scripts to build web pages from this database and create forms that would allow users to put data into the database. MySQL and PHP seemed to be best choice of database and scripting languages available at the time (in March 2003) so I bought a book (first version!) and got stuck in……..

Seriously, I use Ubuntu almost exclusively outside school, and today I was replying to an email from someone who was trying to set up FreeMIS. I had meant to attach an SQL file, which I referred to in the email, but forgot to. When I clicked on send, Kontact (the KDE email client) popped up a warning, saying that I had mentioned an attachment in my message but hadn’t attached anything – did I want to do so?

How cool is that?