Jotting down some notes and to-dos for the IOD personnel app:

- Jerry and I enabled http-based authentication yesterday over an SSL connection to provide extra security. These measures are in place to ensure that only privileged users can access and edit a user’s profile, especially since we need a secure place to add and view users keyed by their UCSD Employee #.

- We still need to establish a direct connection to the BLINK database. Currently I am using an indirect route: Pulling data from Wayne, who in turn is pulling from BLINK. Wayne is only pulling a subset of fields, exluding ones we’d like to have (alt. phone, lab phone, mobile phone, title, etc.).

- Once we can pull all the data we need from BLINK, we need to create lookup tables to match abbreviated values to their actual names. Michelle has already sent an email containing the mappings that belong in the lookup tables.

- For the IOD people who have R.A.B (Research Activities) profiles, we need to harvest those profile links and add them to their IOD profile.

- We should create a “print view” of the personnel, one for the users to download, and perhaps one with extended info for michelle to use.

- The emails should be removed from the list view on the People page to prevent robots from harvesting them. I’d prefer to do this once we have a valid field to take it’s place, like Title.
[UPDATE 1/27] - Replaced the Email column with Building. Ultimately this should be Title, but until we have the database completely populated, this will work fine.
[UPDATE 1/27] - Changed Building to Location and appended the room # if it exists. This works under the assumption that we will replace this column with Titles before Michelle may start adding multiple room numbers for people.

- Last names are in CAPS in BLINK, but should preferably be in Uppercase here.
[UPDATE 1/26] - I wrote a script called name.php which converts all LAST NAMES to just have Upper Case First Letters. This is done using two php functions in conjuction with each other:
$name = ucwords(strtolower($str))
I also modified the syncing script to call these functions when pulling the last name from BLINK.

- Should the phone number format change? Currently it’s (xxx)xxx-xxxx.

- How should we implement the People Search feature?

To anyone else involved with this project, feel free to update or comment on this post. We can experiment with using it as a running log to track the progress.