Academic Transcript Template Production

This documentation relies upon the following knowledge;

CORF2510 - Maintain Letter Parameter types
CORF2520 - Maintain System Letter
ASSF5600 - Academic Transcript (Single)
ASSF5620 - Maintain Transcript Types
ASSJ06V0 - Academic Transcript (Multiple)
Academic Transcript Parameters - An overview of parameters available for academic transcript.
An understanding of Microsoft Word.

Please familiarise yourself with the above documentation, prior to continuing.

A letter template

A Transcript Template is used by the Academic Transcript (Single) form ASSF5600 and the Academic Transcript (Multiple) process ASSJ06V0 to produce transcripts of students' academic record. Transcript Templates are mapped to System Letter Definition in CORF2520. To produce a transcript, the template must be held in the directory specified in control.doc. The control.doc file must be held in the c:\tmp directory. If you have macros in your normal.dot template in Word, you must replace normal.dot with the standard template.

Control.doc
Control.doc is a Word file, containing a Word Basic macro that coordinates the merging of information from Callista into the appropriate template.

Control.doc must be in the c:\tmp directory of any client machine that produces system letters.

Creating a letter template

To create a Transcript Template the user is required to have Word 8.0 (Word 97) or above. Create a new Word document and save it into the directory specified in control.doc, using a name of your choosing. The template must be saved in the directory prior to creating a System Letter Definition in CORF2520. For best results design your template with Word's 'Show/Hide Paragraphs' set to 'Show'. The following examples of formatting Letter Parameters for transcript in the template are meant as a guide only. In the following examples, Letter Parameters have been created with the same name as the system Letter Parameter they have been mapped to. Institution specific data configurations may cause significant variations in the formatting of Letter Parameters in Transcript Templates.

1. Leave a little room for Word.
The Word merge functions available to Callista have a number of irritating features. These include;

The first character on a page may be repeated.
Solution: A blank line is required at the top of the page. This will ensure that the first character on the line is not repeated.
If a Letter Parameter Type has been included in a repeating group, in CORF2520, and the value of the parameter is empty, 19 lines may appear at the top of your page.
Solution: It is necessary to ensure that only appropriate parameters are contained in repeating groups.
After the Word merge has finished, if Num Lock was ON, it will be set to OFF.
Solution: Set Num Lock ON again.
When placing a Letter Parameter in a table cell, no data was returned from Callista, and the table has been modified. For example: additional cells may have been added.
Solution: Insert a return after the Letter Parameter in the table cell.
When creating a letter, incompatibilities between parameters on the template and parameters passed to Word from Callista have been found.
Solution: Replace your normal.dot template with a new normal.dot.

2. Adding Letter Parameters.

Letter Parameters within repeating groups
Letter Parameters that have been included within repeating groups can be inserted into the template as required. If you require all instances of the Letter Parameter to appear it is necessary to place the repeating group code before and after the Letter Parameter. For example: suppose we have created a Letter Parameter called TRN_SUA_CD, which has been mapped to the system Letter Parameter TRN_SUA_CD. In CORF2520, we have created a repeating group (code = REP_UNIT) and specified the TRN_SUA_CD parameter to be within the repeating group. To display all options of student unit attempts the student has undertaken we would place the following on the template;

REP_UNIT

TRN_SUA_PD TRN_SUA_CD TRN_SUA_TL TRN_ACH_CP TRN_SUA_UL TRN_SUA_MK TRN_SUA_GD

REP_UNIT

The output from this would be something like the following:

3. Formatting one or more Letter Parameters on the same line.

TRN_SUA_PD / TRN_SUA_CD

The Letter Parameters TRN_SUA_PD and TRN_SUA_CD have been bolded. If more than one Letter Parameter is on the one line, or text is on the same line, then formatting has to be applied across the whole line. The above would return the following;

2/MAA102

4. Formatting Letter Parameters within a cell.

Letter Parameters within cells can be formatted independently of each other.

Note:

If there is any chance that the parameter you have selected would return no data or text, then it is important that a return is placed at the end of the parameter. This will ensure that the Word merge function does not alter the settings of the table/cell.

5. Formatting a Letter Parameter which contains data separated by tabs.

A number of Letter Parameters return multiple data that have tab separations between the individual data items. The size of the standard data and the amount your institution uses of the available size, will determine how to format the data.

6. A Letter Parameter without formatting.

The above parameter has no formatting, in terms of tabs set for it. The standard tabs will be used for this data. If we look at the output from this, it would be something like the following:

This data could benefit from alignment of the tabs. To aid this process, it is recommended that the appropriate data is copied into the template and the parameter and the data are formatted together. Once you have the required format, the data can be deleted, leaving the parameter with the appropriate format.

7. Miscellaneous advice.

When Letter Parameters and other text (including punctuation) are to appear together, ensure you leave a space between the Letter Parameter and the text.

Last Modified on 8 September, 2003