iep-printing-php is the PHP service, or the power, behind the iep-printing PowerSchool plugin.

• Server Stuff
  • Setup
  • Git iep-pritning-php
• Configuration
  • Apache Config
  • PHP config
  • iep-printing-php config
• Development
  • Vagrant & VirtualBox
  • URLs
  • Request flow
  • HTML Rendering
    • Override HTML Renderer View
  • PDF Rendering
    • Override PDF Renderer
  • gulp
• FormBuilder conventions
• Database stuff
  • IEP tables
  • FormBuilder tables
  • Powerschool tables
• Console commands

See how I provision the vagrant box here. It is designed to mock production so you could use it as a guide when setting up your own production server.

Things that you'll need to install on the server are:

• git
• alien
• pdftk
• libaio1
• apache2
  • enable rewrite module
• PHP 7.0 + modules:
  • php7.0-dev php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-mbstring php7.0-xml php7.0-zip libapache2-mod-php7.0
• Oracle InstantClient 12c (basic and sdk/development packages)
  • use alien -i oracle-package.rpm to install. basic first then sdk.
• oci8
  • install by pecl install oci8
  • if you run pecl and get a bunch of errors do this thingy here.
    • nano `which pecl`
    • take out the -n option from the last line
    • try pecl install again. you'll get some errors at the end of the install but it will have worked.
• composer
  • curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
• wkhtmltopdf
  • download the right one for your server curl -O http://download.gna.org/wkhtmltopdf/0.12/0.12.2.1/wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-trusty-amd64.deb
  • install via dpkg -i --force-depends wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-trusty-amd64.deb
  • install the dependency packages apt-get install -f

# use git to clone this repository to your server
git clone https://github.com/IronCountySchoolDistrict/iep-printing-php.git /var/www/iep-printing-php

# go into the new directory
cd /var/www/iep-printing-php/

# install dependency packages with composer
composer install

Edit the apache config file.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Since requests to this service is going to originate on PowerSchool you need to enable CORS with something like this.

# specify the web root
DocumentRoot /var/www/iep-printing-php/public

<Directory /var/www/iep-printing-php/public>
  AllowOverride All
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET,POST,HEAD,DELETE,PUT,OPTIONS"
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Content-Type"
</Directory>

You could change the * for the Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin option to the domain name of your PowerSchool instance to only allow POST requests to originate from that domain.

Also note that since PowerSchool admin is https only all requests it makes to this server will also go over https. Therefore, you'll need to enable the apache ssl module sudo a2enmod ssl and get a certificate for this service. Checkout valid SSL certificates with letsencrypt.

If you don't go with letsencrypt you'll need to reference your SSL certificate and key and let apache2 listen on port 443 by adding something like the following at the end of 000-default.conf

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
  <VirtualHost _default_:443>
    ...
    DocumentRoot /var/www/iep-printing-php/public
    <Directory /var/www/iep-printing-php/public>
      AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
    ...
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/iep-printing-php.cert
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/iep-printing-php.key
    ...
  </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Most of the modules that are needed can be installed by the package manager apt-get. The Module oci8 however, that you installed via pecl, needs to be added to the php.ini file. You'll need to do this for both apache and cli .ini files.

Open php config for apache

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

Add the line extension=oci8.so toward the end of the file. I usually add it in the section where all the other modules are loaded.

Open php config for cli and do the same

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini

# Copy the example config to its own file.
cp .env.example .env

# Generate an app key with php artisan
# this is necesssary just for laravel to work
# though this application doesn't encrypt/decrypt any data
php artisan key:generate

# open the .env file to change values
nano .env

Some of the values in the .env file are unimportant. Here are the ones that you should care about.

APP_DEBUG=true Set to false for production
DB_CONNECTION=oracle PowerSchool's database is oracle

DB connection credentials
ORACLE_HOST=127.0.0.1 IP/Domain of OracleDB
ORACLE_DATABASE=PowerSchool
ORACLE_USERNAME=PowerSchoolAdmin User with read/write permissions
ORACLE_PASSWORD=secret
ORACLE_SERVICE_NAME=OracleServiceName

IEP_DISTRICT_NAME=Smallville School District
IEP_DISTRICT_STREET=123 ABC Street
IEP_DISTRICT_CITY=Smallville
IEP_DISTRICT_STATE=Kansas
IEP_DISTRICT_ZIP=12345
IEP_DISTRICT_PHONE=555-555-5555
IEP_DISTRICT_FAX=555-555-5555

These are all for override only. Remove otherwise.
IEP_FORMS_STORAGE_PATH=/full/path/to/override-forms
IEP_BLANKS_STORAGE_PATH=/full/path/to/override-forms
IEP_DRAFT_WATERMARK=/full/path/to/watermarks/draft.pdf
IEP_COPY_WATERMARK=/full/path/to/watermarks/copy.pdf
IEP_HTML_RENDERER_PATH=iep.html If you are overriding html version of forms. Specify where they are in the blade heirarchy here.
IEP_HTML_RENDERER_ZOOM=0.75 Changes how zoomed in the forms appear that are rendered via HTML. I've noticed that on headless systems you need to zoom out, thus 75%. If this is being hosted on a machine that has a resolution higher than 800x600 than you'll have to play with the value until it looks okay.

You can work on the iep-printing-php on your own environment seperated from production using vagrant with virtualbox. Reasons why you might want to do this is that you want to override how a form renders, add new forms, test printing, change font and other styles, and new features ;)

Note: When I say 'for printing' I basically mean looking at the PDF file before anyone would actually send to a printer for printing.

To get your own version running on your machine:

• download and install VirtualBox
• download and install Vagrant
• Clone or download this repo to your machine somewhere appropriate.
• In command line tool navigate to the root of the application.
• run the command vagrant up
  • the first time will take a while to download the ubuntu image and provision the virtual machine.
• Open your hosts file and add this line at the bottom
  192.168.10.10 iep-dev
• Now configure your environment by following these steps. Keep in mind that this time you're doing it for a development environment, not production.
• Visit iep.dev in your browser and Bam~! You're ready to go.

There are 4 groups of URLs.

Frame URLs are all URLs that have to do with the iframe that people see in powerschool. Each one requires some parameters to work.

• / Index page: requires the student's frn and the user id. This page loads up the main screen that people use to view and work on IEPs.
• /iep Iep page: This page simply loads data for the iep you give it. It is meant to be called via ajax to load the resulting html on the index page.
• /iep/print Post to this url to get the pdf for selected forms for the selected IEP.
• /iep/delete Post to this url to delete the given IEP. Meant to only delete IEPs without any responses. Validation for this happens on the frontend.
• /iep/activate Post to this url to activate the given IEP. As a result will deactivate any previously active IEP.
• /iep/print-test Requires paramters formid (id of the form to print), title (FormBuiler title of the form to print), and responseid(the response to the form so data can be found. Can give a 0 to purposefully find no data to fill into the form). This gives back the PDF. Can add html as a parameter (no value required) and it will try to give you back the rendered HTML for a form instead of the PDF.
• /iep/response-count Returns the count of form builder responses associated with an IEP.

These are URLs that are being called by the powerschool side. These all happen on FormBuilder pages.

• /iep/update Each time a form is submitted this is called to update the IEP by associating a new FormBuilder response to the IEP, updating the start date of an IEP if it was the right form or updating the case manager if it was the right form.
• /iep/attach Depricated. Was used to attach a response to an IEP but that is all included in the update.

All of the urls associated with this are depricated. Only there in cases where they have not updated the powerschool plugin.

These are pages of content built for some random reason. Only consists of one at this time.

• /learning It is basically a webpage that has a User guide documentation on it with some screenshots.

Requests that come in for printing can have a few different paths depending on what is available for the form selected.
There is also some required data and some optional data that is passed at the beginning of a print request.

Parameters:

• selected This is an json array of selected forms. The data might look something like this for each item in the array.

[
    {
        "formid": "123456",
        "title": "IEP: SpEd 6a1",
        "responseid": "1234567"
    },
    ...
]

• student This is a json object that has data for a student. Within the object it is looking specifically for the student's dcid so that we can fetch student data from the DB.
• fileOption This is the option of how the user wants the results back. Can concatenate all PDFs together or put them into a zip file. If it is only 1 form being requested the result will always be a PDF.
• watermarkOption This will can add a watermark to every resulting PDF page. Possible values are "final" (no watermark), "copy", and "draft"

After all these parameters check out we send it all to App\Jobs\PrintPdf class.
When this class gets instantiated eash selected form, and accompanying data, is turned into a App\Iep\Response object.
If a blade template view exists for the given form the HTML will be rendered and then transformed into a PDF file with the watermark added if applicable. If however, a blade template view does not exist we fall back to some legacy stuff. We send it off to the App\Iep\Legacy\Commands\FillPdfCommand where the PDF file is copied, data is applied to it, and the watermark added. The result is sent back to the PrintPdf class where its concatenated with the other forms.
If an exception is thrown during any of this process the error is saved to a variable associated with the formid and will return along with a file if one was generated from the other forms.

What gets returned is the URL for the generated file (so it can be downloaded) and an array of errors (if there were any).

As mentioned, some forms have been rebuilt in HTML making them much more flexible in handling different amounts of data. Examples of this is strings of data ranging from 0 characters to 4000 characters. PDFs have a defined space for input and it can't be stretched on the fly. HTML can be. So for new forms it is strongly advised that you rebuild the PDF in HTML for filling in data.

Since this is a Laravel application, we use Blade templates for the HTML. The default location for these templates are located at resources/views/iep/html.

When naming the file there is a convention that you must follow. Name the file in all lowercase letters and "slugify" the FormBuilder title of the form. For example IEP: SpEd 03a will become iep-sped-03a. So the name of the blade template file will be named iep-sped-03a.blade.php. While you have the freedom to build out the HTML however you like, you can stick with what I've been doing which is inheriting from a base HTML theme, so to speak, and building out the body.

@extends('iep.layouts.default') <!-- extend the HTML layout blade template -->

@section('title', 'IEP: SpEd 03a') <!-- give an HTML <title>. generally the title of the form -->

@section('stylesheet')
    @parent

    <style>
        .form-specific-style {
            font-size: 2em;
        }
    </style>
@endsection

@section('content')
    <div>
        Recreate the form here with HTML.
    </div>
@endsection

This default layout includes the bootstrap framework so you can use any of its classes and markup.

Some notable classes that I've added to help building out HTML that look like forms is the .left and .right.

.left Use with a div and the contents will take up as much space as is needed.
.right Use with a div just after using .left and it will take up any remaining space that .left didn't take up.
I use these two classes heavily as many forms label an input like this_________________________________________.
Adding the class .underline with right will give that effect. Look in any template and you'll see it's use case.

Make use of the partial templates in resources/views/iep/html/_partials.

• checkbox here is an example

@include('iep.html._partials.checkbox', ['haystack' => $responses->get('checkbox#1'), 'needle' => 'Yes'])

If the string Yes exists in $responses->get('checkbox#1') then the checkbox will be checked.

• checkmark works the same as checkbox only it will give you a checkmark with no box around it

If you find yourself having to repeat a snippet of HTML over and over. Move it out to a new partial and just @include('myPartial') as many times as you need to.

When you get to creating these PDFs from HTML you might notice some wierd things or you may get a request to change something. Or, maybe someone wants to you to change the form completely. In this case, don't go and edit the existing one. You can create your own folder within resources/views to house all of your own customizations to forms. You can use it as a way to override existing blade template views and create your own.

Lets say you created a folder to house all of your custom HTML blade templates for some forms you need changed in resources/views/iep/overrides. Open your .env file and change the value for IEP_HTML_RENDERER_PATH to equal iep.overrides. When printing requests come in it will look in the overrides folder first for an HTML template to use and fall back to iep.html if nothing is found.

PDFs by default are located in storage/forms. The process of getting data to fill into a PDF file is all based on conventions that you need to follow for everything to work out okay.

When you are creating the form in FormBuilder, you need to give input fields that corespond with a field in the PDF file a CSS class that uniquely identifies it that begins with pdf_. An example of this could be that you have an input for someone's first name so you give it the css class pdf_first-name. When this application looks for data for responses to this form it will match first-name with the given FormBuilder input. All of this information will be accessible in the App\Iep\Response object. In the templates for these you can get the input response by doing $responses->get('first-name'). The $responses variable could have a lot more data to like $responses->get('last-name') or $responses->get('checkgroup1').

When the request comes in to fill in a PDF, much like the blade templates for HTML, you'll need to create a template for filling in a PDF. Instead of HTML though, these are custom blocks of code specific to a form. Again, you need to follow another convention when naming them and note that this one is different than the HTML version. If you have a form titled IEP: SpEd 03a you need to strip off IEP: and keep all capilizations the same. So the blade template to fill in the PDF data would be SpEd 03a.blade.php. All blade templates for PDFs is located in resoureces/views/iep/forms.

Inside a blade template, use whatever logic that needs to happen to fill in the different fields. Assuming that when you created all the fillable fields in the PDF, you named the fields the SAME name you gave in FormBuilder. So we had pdf_first-name we would fill in the data on the PDF form field named first-name. To fill this in you would need this line of code $pdf->setField('first-name', $responses->get('first-name').

FormBuilder assigns a type to each form field you give it. It makes it simple to detect what is easily fillable in the PDF without any logic. For example if you had a PDF with only text inputs and no checkboxes you could loop over the response data and fill in the PDF like this.

@foreach ($responses->responses as $response)
  @if ($response['type'] == 'text' || $response['type'] == 'paragraph' || $response['type'] == 'dropdown')
    @include('iep._partials.text')
  @endif
@endforeach

Here we include the partial that has the logic to fill in the PDF the $response['value'].

Other partials are there for your use which are

• @include('iep._partials.checkbox') If the $response['type'] == 'checkbox' include this partial. It will split the $response['value'] and see if any of them match checkboxes in the PDF. You could also specify the regex to which it splits the $response[value] which may be needed sometimes like this @include('iep._partials.checkbox', ['split' => '/,\s+/']).
• @include('iep._partials.radio') This one works exactly like the checkbox partial.

The default location for all fillable PDFs is in storage/forms. If you want to start overriding then you can copy them all to your own folder on your server and specify the full path to it in the .env file's IEP_FORMS_STORAGE_PATH option.

Unlike the HTML way overriding it wont fallback to the default location. It will assume that your new folder contains all the forms for the requests that might come in. Thats why I say to copy them. But if at all possible it is much simpler to do things the HTML way. Just sayin'.

All the CSS and JS in the project is done according to the guidelines in place on laravel's documentation for elixir. Take a look to find out how to use this to add your own styles or javascript.

It is important these conventions be followed when creating or editing forms in FormBuilder. It will have an effect on how this application behaves.

When you create an element in FormBuilder it has a few properties, CSS class being one of them. Each form element that you want to match to a field for printing needs a unique css class that is prefixed with pdf_. For example if you create an element in FormBuilder intended to get a persons first name then you could uniquely identify that field with the CSS class of pdf_first-name. Don't use spaces. Dashes are preferred seperator but you could use other characters too.

These type of elements can have more than one answer and you can only give the checkbox group a single name like pdf_checkbox-group. If you had this checkbox group and the options were 1, 2, and 3 and if all three were checked, Formbuilder saves the response value for this element as 1, 2, 3 as a string. You can call this value in a template by doing this

$responses->get('checkbox-group') // "1, 2, 3"

If you wanted to check the checkbox on the blade template for a form for the value of 3 you would have to do an something like this

if (strpos($responses->get('checkbox-group'), '3') !== false) {
    // check the box
}

// or just include the blade partial template already provided to handle this
@include('iep.html._partials.checkbox', ['haystack' => $responses->get('checkbox-group'), 'needle' => '3'])
// this will give you a checked box if '3' is in checkbox-group or a box with no check if otherwise

In this case everything works fine because after it splits up all the values of the response (which is an array like this ['1', '2', '3']), sometimes the values for these checkboxes can be long sentences with commas already in them. In that case, the needle needs to be a unique subset of the full sentence.
For example if the possible values for pdf_checkbox-group was funny, smart, sexy, and attractive, the value of the $responses->get('checkbox-group') would end up being funny, smart, sexy, attractive. When this gets past to the partial it will split it up like this ['funny', 'smart', 'sexy', 'attractive']. So in this case the needle would either be smart or sexy.

Note: In FormBuilder you can add a pipe | character followed by text that won't show up when filling out the forms but they will show up in the $responses.
Note: Like the checkbox element checkbox values can have a pipe \ character followed by text. However, this pipe character doesn't get passed through in the $responses object.

IEP forms need to begin with IEP: . If its not, this system wont think it is an IEP form and so will leave it out. The description has no restriction.

When you install the iep-printing plugin for PowerSchool it will create the tables necessary for tracking IEPs.

Also, this IEP project relies on the PowerSchool plugin [FormBuilder] by Accela School for collecting data. Along with this plugin comes their table schemas which are used to query the data from when looking to print a form.

A student can have many IEPs. Student is referenced by the column studentsdcid. Other data kept track of by this table is the start_date and the case_manager.

Kind of a weird relationship that links IEPs with FormBuilder responses. It contains the column u_sped_iepid to reference u_sped_iep table and then u_fb_form_response_id to reference FormBuilder's u_fb_form_response table which keeps track of responses to forms and also links details about the response.

Each form created in form builder is referenced here. Important colums are id (id of the form. a negitive id means it is a deleted form), form_title (title of the form).

This keeps track of which student has a response to which form. A student can have many responses for each form. A form can have many students respond to it. It contains the columns id the id of the response, created_by the name of who filled out the form and submitted, student_id the ID of the student, u_fb_form_id the id of the form submitted.

Has most of the data for a student.

Used to know which school a student is attending.

Has some extra columns used to autofill in some form fields.

There is only one console command created for this project.

Upon first installing the iep-printing plugin to PowerSchool, if there are responses to IEP forms that are need to be included in an IEP run the artisan command php artisan iep:create --all. This will create an IEP for any student that has a response to an IEP form and then associate the latest response for each form they have a response to. This command is only meant to be ran once if at all. If you run it again it will create another IEP on top of what was already created and the result will be duplicated.

If somehow, a single student has responses to IEP forms but there is no IEP and there are no associated responses, you can run that same command specifying that particular student's DCID. php artisan iep:create 12345 This will create essentially do the same thing as running this command with the --all option but it will only execute for the specified student.