Miscellaneous Updates on UMRA

In the past 2 days, I have been working on making some fixes to UMRA, as well as writing a new application.
Below are the details.

Student Maintenance UMRA Forms applications: [Updates]
I have made a multitude of minor fixes to the Student Maintenance application, based on some reports that I had received from various people including teachers, and/or technology staff.

Bug Fixes: 

• When a user created an account, they could potentially receive a message stating that the new account has been created, when it really hasn't. Now, the reporting is corrected, and if the account has failed to be created, it will state it to the user. [fixed]
• There was a bug in the account creation process which was not formatting the middle initial of the username correctly, and therefore creating a constraint violation error in Active Directory. This has now been fixed, and will allow many less failures in account creations. [fixed]
• The username generation algorithm has been modified to account for some additional mistakes that the users may make while inputting student information. Particularly, all usernames, and last names will never have a "-" at the end, if the last name happens to be hyphenated. This should make the usernames cleaner as they are being created. [fixed]

Modify User Information: [New Application]

Since the user generation process does not usually change the username, first name, middle name, last name, or full name fields after they have been created. The process up until now required me to go to the database everytime there is a mistake with a user information, and make a whole slew of changes that would trickle to Active Directory, and the user's folder, this was a process that took about 15 minutes per student to fix. 

I have written this application to allow for an easy rename of a student account, without heavy involvement on the back end. 

Here's a summary of the steps that happen:

User Action:

• You choose the "Modify Student Information" Task from the "Infrastructure Management" application in UMRA forms. (you will only be able to get through if you have security access to make these modifications, right now, Helpdesk, and a few other people have that access, if you feel that you should have access, and don't, please talk to me).
  
  

• You enter the student's PermID

• The student information gets retrieved and displayed from all 3 sources (AD, DB and Aeries). Or will report which ever ones are missing. 

• 3 Fields will be available if the account is eligible for renaming--> First Name, Middle Name and Last name. Fill in the correct information. Don't worry about hyphens, all will be handled within the app. 

• You will have a chance to review the upcoming changes before committing them. 

• Click commit to perform the changes. All the changes will be performed, and you will be presented with a status summary, and the new username and password for the user. No further action is required of you. (See below for what happens in the backend). 

Backend Activity:

When a user name change is requested and committed, a lot happens in the back-end. Here is a quick overview of that:

• Old user account gets retrieved.
• When entering the new first name, middle name, and last name,  the username algorithm runs and generates an appropriate username, and checks to make sure that the username does not already exist in the database, nor the userarchive (users who have left the district).
• The file server is checked for that student's school, to see if the student has a folder. 
• AD is also checked to see if the student has an AD account. 
• Once all is confirmed, the changes are committed to the database, the username gets changed in Active Directory, as well as the appropriate folder on the file server. 
• A new password gets generated based on the new first name, and last name. 
• A log is written that describes the details, and any failures/successes that may have happened during this process. 

Finally, I have tested this on a few students, and it seems to work well. for those of you who do have access to it, and need to use it, please keep me informed of any unexpected behavior in using this tool. 

I hope that this will help us all be a bit more efficient in getting students up and running whenever there are issues with their accounts.