Rolling Over Entity Data

The Rollover window, accessed via the Tools menu, allows Accelerus administrators to copy entity data from one academic cycle to another, such as from year to year or from one semester to another.

Therefore, if a school sets up its data well to begin with, each cycle is much easier to set up, where the requirements are similar, in the next and future cycles.

The window allows data to be selectively rolled over, within each entity type.

Ent RolloverWindowNumbers

Important features of this window include the following:

#	Feature
1	It does not matter what cycles have been chosen in the Academic Cycle Selector when you open the Rollover window, as it allows the rolling over of data from any cycle to any other cycle available in the database. Therefore, Perpetual will be displayed in the top right corner of the Rollover window's title bar.
2	Only one type of entity may be rolled over at once, and an option button appears for each entity type that can copied using this window. In the case of cohort entities, there will be a button for each type that has been defined in the School Settings window, eg one for Year Level and one for Home Group.
3	Most of the entity types that may be selected have checkbox options that allow you to include or exclude particular records. For example, when rolling over subjects, you may include or exclude closed subjects, subject descriptions, comment bank assignments and the subject role assignments. In addition, within the one entity type you may copy over subsets of data, with different sets of options selected, according to your needs. For example, you may want to copy the class teacher assignments with one set of classes but not for another.
4	You select the academic cycle to copy from in the top of the two selectors, ie the source cycle, and the one to copy to - the target cycle - in the bottom selector. The selectors works like the Academic Cycle Selector in the status bar, except that they only allow one cycle to be selected and do not automatically select all overlapping cycles. You may select to copy any academic cycle to any another, whether the source or target cycles are annual, semester or terms. The target cycle does not have to belong to the same academic category. For example, on the one hand, if you have semester cycles and your needs in semester 2 are similar to those in semester 1, you may copy over subjects, classes and assessment items selectively using the Rollover window. On the other, you may want to copy some of the annual subjects you had in one year to a semester cycle in the next year.
5	Once an entity and a source cycle have been selected, all of the records for the selections will be displayed in the table at the top of the window. You may choose which of these are to be rolled over. This table works like standard selection windows in Accelerus.
6	Once you have selected the records to be copied over, clicking the Preprocess button will run a process which compares the selected data in the source cycle with any data of the same entity in the target cycle. You are informed of the impact of the copy process on existing data prior to actually copying the records. Issues, errors and warnings are reported back, and displayed in the pane below.
7	The Preprocess pane lists all of the issues, errors and warnings under broad types or headings, eg records that will be copied over as they do not exist in the target cycle, records that do exist but will be updated, etc. To begin with, only the issue headings are displayed. You may double click a heading, or click the arrowhead to its left, to display the details of the records to which the issue applies. Double clicking again will hide the details. In the case of rolling over Student Custom Properties, this pane does not appear to begin with but, instead a table displays the custom properties that may be rolled over to the selected cycles. Once selections have been made here and its Preprocess button clicked, the Preprocess pane appears.
8	In many cases, the details for an issue do not need to be revealed, eg 14 subjects are not in the target academic cycle, as shown above. These are the records that will be rolled over afresh. However, in others it is very important that all of the issues are read carefully and the individual lines to which the issue pertains are checked carefully. By revealing the details of an issue, you may investigate further and take steps to remedy any problems, if necessary. If any issues are raised that you do not expect, it is recommended that you cancel out of the rollover and investigate these further. If you choose to ignore errors or unexpected issues and continue with the rollover, the changes may be irreversible, eg if you rollover into the wrong academic cycle.
9	For each issue type, there is a dropdown action box. A default action will be displayed, eg Add all new subjects, or Retain where subjects already exist in the target cycle. In most cases, alternative actions are available for selection from the dropdown list. You may also change the action for an individual record, when the details are displayed. In this case, the heading's action will automatically change to Individually Specified.
10	The Print button allows you to preview and print out a copy of all issues and selected details, if you need to investigate further. The printout will only include the individual details of the issue rows that are currently open. Where an issue is contracted, only the issue header will be printed.
11	When all issues have been investigated and corrected, where necessary, clicking the Rollover button will copy over the selected records from the source cycle to the target cycle, including or excluding the data you have specified in the various checkboxes.

Schools in the Victorian Catholic and Government sectors cannot copy over AusVELS parameters from one cycle to another via the Rollover window; AusVELS system subjects and assessment items are excluded from selection in this window. However, there is a Quick Setup Copy window especially designed to allow the copying of subjects and settings from one semester's Quick Setup to another.

There is a separate Report Run Copy window that allows you to copy the report production parameters from one report run to another.

•	You must make sure that you take a copy of your database before you embark on rolling over your data from one cycle to another, or undertaking any process that changes data in bulk.

•	As with the importing of data into Accelerus when setting up or at the beginning of a cycle, you must do so in a particular order to ensure all of the data required by a particular entity is already available to it. The order that the entities appear in the Rollover window is the correct order.

•	There are times when it is not necessary to rollover some entities. For example, if rolling over from semester 1 to semester 2, you will usually only need to roll over subjects, classes and assessment items, as annual entities such as year levels and home groups will already be set up for the year.

•	In the case of subjects, classes and assessment items, in particular, you may have to perform multiple rollovers because they may, firstly, belong to different source cycles and, secondly, need to be copied to different target cycles.

•	Of particular importance when rolling over data is to ensure that you have selected the correct target academic cycle.

Subject, classes and assessment items belong to specific academic cycles that may be in force at any point in time. For example, you may have annual subjects and subjects that belong to semester 1.

If you make an error and rollover subjects into the wrong academic cycle, you may be overwriting existing data or end up with subjects in a cycle from which they cannot be moved.

With classes and assessment items, they may be rolled over into the wrong cycle's subjects. For example, if you have a subject coded 07ENG in both semester 1 and semester 2, it is very easy to rollover into the wrong one of these.

The cycle selectors in the Rollover window will only display the cycles that are applicable to the type of entity selected. For example, if you select Year Levels which are defined as belonging to the annual category, only annual cycles will appear in the From and To cycle selectors, as shown below. On the other hand, if you have subjects that could be any of annual, semester or term categories, all of the cycles for these categories will appear.

Ent RolloverCyclesAnnualOnly

The steps for rolling over are very similar for all types of entities. Follow the general steps outlined here, and refer to the specific sections below which describe the different checkboxes, special procedures or idiosyncrasies of the particular entity.

•	Make a backup of your school's database.

•	Go to the Tools menu and select Rollover.

•	In the Rollover Types section, select the first of the entities to be rolled over by clicking its option button.

Keep in mind that prerequisite data must already exist, eg teachers if rolling over cohort groups, subjects before classes, etc.

•	Tick any boxes to include particular aspects of the entity to roll over.

Ent RolloverCheckboxes

•	In the From and To cycle sections, select the academic cycle being copied from and to, respectively, using the same methods to select cycles as in the Academic Cycle Selector in the status bar.

Note that only applicable cycles will be displayed or be able to be selected. As shown here, you cannot select 2011 or Sem1 in 2001 in the To section when Sem1 of 2011 has been selected in the From section.

Ent RolloverCycles

•	In the table at the right top of the window, use the standard selection window procedures to select the records to be rolled over:

➢	Enter search criteria to find the records you require, including using wildcards, and making selections in any special dropdown fields that appear:

➢	Customise columns, eg change their order, hide or display particular columns.

➢	Sort the records in the table.

➢	Use multiple selection procedures to select the table rows required, or all records that match the selection criteria.

Ent RolloverSelections

Take care when rolling over subjects, classes and assessment items that you do not include closed subjects if you do not wish to. By default, in the Rollover window, subjects marked as closed are included in the table of available records. To exclude them, you must select Open from the Closed column's dropdown list.

Note, however, that system subjects cannot be selected. Only Non-system subjects appear in the dropdown list for this column.

•	With the records to be rolled over selected, click the Preprocess button.

Ent RolloverPreprocessButton

•	In the preprocess pane:

➢	Carefully check the issues, errors and warnings that are reported, clicking open the issue headings to check the details of the individual records.

➢	If required, in the Action field, click the dropdown arrow to choose another option to the default, to apply to all records under that heading, or to individual records.

Ent RolloverPreprocessPane

➢	If you want a print out of particular issues, eg to check out or fix any anomalies or unexpected issues:

®	Close any issue headers you don't need details of.

®	Open the issue headers whose details you want to print.

®	Click the Print button.

®	From the Preview window, print the listing.

Ent RolloverPrint

•	Where there are errors or unexpected issues, investigate these before returning to the Rollover window and preprocessing again.

Do not proceed unless you have fixed all errors and know exactly why different issues arose. If you proceed, the errors are likely to be compounded as you rollover further entities. For example, errors in the subject rollover will effect classes and assessment items, and so forth.

•	Click the Rollover button, when ready to proceed.

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•	Ensure that the source and target academic cycles displayed in the next message are correct and, if they are, click the Yes button to proceed.

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•	Wait while the data is rolled over, clicking OK at the completion message.

Ent RolloverComplete

When rolling over cohort groups, be aware that:

•	The Rollover Types section will display an option button for each of the cohort types that your school has set up in the Cohort Types tab of the School Settings window. As shown here, Year Level and Home Group are the defined cohort types.

•	An Include Membership checkbox appears for every cohort type but it is not very often that this is selected. Usually, student cohort memberships are imported in annually or more often, where applicable, using a CSV file or XML file, as appropriate.

Only tick this box if your school has a cohort type that has been defined as annual but, in most cases, the student memberships remain the same across years.

•	For each cohort type, where cohort roles have been defined in the Security window, a checkbox will appear, ie if you have defined Home Group Teachers 1 and 2, two checkboxes will appear for the Home Group cohort.

Tick these if, when copying over the groups, you want to copy over the teacher assignments as well. If, for example, the home group teachers are different this year compared to last year, you should not tick the Include Home Group Teacher box.

Otherwise, if many are similar, you can copy these over and then manually change those requiring it.

The copying of subjects across cycles will be one of the major uses of the Rollover window.

There are two main issues relating to the rollover of subjects:

•	The most important issue when rolling over subjects is being very sure about what academic structure you want for your subjects and hope to achieve through the rollover, and making the correct selections to carry this out.

Subjects are rolled over in subsets, for each academic cycle that you want them to be copied to. If the academic cycle structure of your subjects last year is how you want it to be this year, then you will do at least one rollover for each academic cycle, eg of the annual subjects, semester subjects, term subjects, etc, to their equivalent target cycle.

If you want to change the academic cycle structure in a new year, you may do so, and carry out as many rollovers as required. For example, if you had all annual subjects last year but want to move to a combined annual/semester structure, you can copy over just the subjects that are to remain annual from one year to another, and then rollover just the subjects that are to go into semester 1.

•	The implications of the selections made for the different checkboxes need to be understood.

➢	If you tick the Copy Closed/Open Status box it means that if a subject being copied has been closed in the source cycle, it will be copied over in a closed state. Therefore, it will not appear in Quick Find or the various Explorers by default.

On the other hand, if you want the subjects being copied to all be copied in an open status, no matter how found in the source cycle, do not tick this checkbox.

Note that closed subjects are included by default in the table of subjects when rolling over subjects, classes or assessment items.

➢	Subjects have an optional description field that may be used to describe the subject, what was taught, etc, usually used where it is to appear on student reports. Select Include Description checkbox to copy this over with the other data about the subjects.

➢	School comment banks are assigned to subjects so that teachers can draw upon them when writing comments for students. If you tick the Include Comment Bank Subject Assignments checkbox, these subject assignments will be copied with the base subject data.

If you do not select this, you will have to reassign the comment banks from scratch.

➢	A checkbox will appear for each subject role that has been defined at the subject level in the Security window.

Tick these if you want to copy over the subject teacher assignments as part of the subject copy process. If those in subject roles are much the same as the source cycle, tick this box, and you can manually change those requiring it later.

In order to rollover classes, the subjects they belong to must already exist, whether rolled over or imported.

The rolling over of classes is most likely to be used when rolling over from one semester to another, where there are very similar subjects in the two semesters.

Otherwise, class data is often extracted from a school's timetable package each academic cycle. Ent RolloverClasses

As with subjects, the main issue is to make sure that the classes are being copied from the correct source cycle to the correct target cycle.

In the case of classes, especially where you have identical sets of subjects each semester or term, you may end up with the classes being added to the wrong cycle's subjects.

As for the checkboxes found under the Classes option:

•	Include Description refers to the optional class description field available in class records. This is only used where a description is to appear on reports and each class of the subject has a different description. You need only include this if your school uses it.

•	If you tick Include Enrolments, not only will the class information get copied, but also the actual students enrolled in the classes being copied. Only students who are not withdrawn from the source classes are copied.

This may be handy where you have semesterised all of your subjects but, in actual fact, a substantial number of them have the same set of enrolments all year.

•	A checkbox will appear for each class role that has been defined at the class level in the Security window.

Tick these if you want to copy over the teacher assignments as part of the class copy process.

Again, this would be handy where you want to duplicate the first semester's classes for semester 2.

Assessment items belong to subjects and, therefore, you must ensure that the subjects for the items being copied already exist in the cycles being copied to.

In the same way as you may need to do multiple rollovers for subjects, the same is true for the assessment items that belong to them.

Ent RolloverAssessmentItems

In terms of assessment items, the issues to be aware relate to:

•	The three checkboxes:

➢	If you tick the Copy Lock/Unlock Status, if an assessment item was locked in the source cycle, it will be copied over as a locked item.

Otherwise, if you deselect this box, all assessment items being copied will be copied in an unlocked state.

In most cases you will want to copy over the items in an unlocked state, although they may be easily locked in the Assessment Item Organiser.

As seen above, term 1 assessment items from 2011 are being copied over and they are all locked in that year, but they are going to be copied over in an unlocked state as they are going to be the first items for teachers to assess in a new year.

➢	In the case of restricted assessment items, it is more likely that you will want to copy over that status from one cycle to another. Therefore, this box would be ticked. If deselected, the items will all be copied in an available state.

➢	Calculations in the assessment items being copied may be copied along with the other parameters of the items by ticking the Include Calculation box.

•	The fields that appear in the table of assessment items.

When the table of items appears, the five special dropdown fields with icons in their column headings come with default selections:

➢	Assessment items belonging to all subjects, whether closed or open, appear in the table.

➢	No system subjects' items appear and nor can they be selected.

➢	Both locked and unlocked assessment items appear.

➢	Both restricted and non-restricted items appear.

➢	Only subject assessment items are selected but class assessment items may be selected from the dropdown list, if required.

Ent RolloverAssItemsDropdowns

In most cases, student custom properties do not need to be copied over from cycle to cycle. It is only any that are not perpetual that may need rolling over.

If the custom properties belong to different academic cycle categories, eg some are annual and others are semester based, you will need to carry out multiple rollovers, one for each cycle that you need to copy to.

When copying custom properties, you must make two sets of selections in the Rollover window before you can preprocess:

•	The students whose custom properties are to be rolled over, and

•	The custom properties that belong to the selected academic cycle that are to be rolled over for these students.

As shown below, in the first table all of the students who have a value in the Detention custom property have been selected, ie where the field is not equal to blank. Then this custom property has been selected in the second table, from the two that are available at the semester level - the Academic Cycle Category column informs you of the level.

Ent RolloverCustomPropPanel

Schools in the Victorian Catholic and Government sectors do not need to copy over any of the AusVELS custom properties as these are automatically added each semester as part of the importing of a student details XML file.