I have a professional membership organization that wants learners to have the ability to export/print their learning transcripts in PDF format for submission to an accreditation agency, including credit hours within the report. This reminds me much of the course certificate module in a way, where you can customize many visual aspects of the certificate. In this case, I demonstrated the Record of Learning available to each learner, but the client was hoping for more in the way of giving the learner a way to open the report as a PDF and print it, and the client was also hoping to somehow control the visual aspects of the PDF printout so as to make it more recognizable by the accreditation agency. I am still trying to better understand the need, but thought I would throw this out into the subscriber community to see if anyone has a workaround to this kind of need, and to feel out the community if this might be something others have interest in.
Best practice forum (Archived)
Feature Feeler - report export to PDF
Hi Jamie
We have the same issue here - with the NZ Law Society introducing a CPD hours requirement for their annual practice certiifcate. We looking at way to caputure 'reflections' on the training via our level 1 evalution process (feedback module) and providing a Record of Learning view that's initailly exportabe as a Excel Spreadsheet (so they are add other evidence). Our aim is that this output is a pre-formated PDF doc. We currently already have a PDF export for the staff member's development plan - screen shot.
Woudl be hapy to share and co-develop this function with you.
Cheers
Austen
Hi Austen, this is very nice. Could I get in touch with you in regards to this functionality and maybe have a peek at the sample PDF report? I am not 100% clear on the final requirements but I am almost wondering if our client isn't wanting some way to customize the PDF much like with the certificate module.
Hi Jamie
My understanding is our vendor (based in the same building as Torara HQ) has already ported this PDF export of the user development plan from our current Totara 1.1 to Totara 2.4. I suspect its seperate code from a PDF export from the Report builder engine.
Attached is a PDF export of my plan for this year - I've blanked out my managers name (more out of habit rather than it being secert). It shows as being from a different business unit (SD&I) becase I did a demo for them on the 12 July (hence the comment of that date).
It's sorted to show, if held, a Plan Objective statement (my's blank) then grouped by Competecies (sorted by priority, all start as 'low') and then within each competecy the linked development activities and how they are linked, status & due date. Any comments made are also shown. We feel its a good start.
Cheers
Austen
We actually have a patch in our review system at the moment which adds PDF as an export option for report builder reports. I'm not sure right now how ready it is but it might be a good starting point.
For controlling formatting one possibility would be to include the report description in the PDF export, since the description is rich text and can include formatting and images. Again some more work is probably required.
Simon
Simon,
Does the proposed PDF export feature apply to a learner's My Learning -> Record of Learning report?
Austen: thanks for all your feedback on this. Does the PDF report you demonstrated in this thread apply to learning plans, or learners' record of learning?
Thanks again all for your feedback.
Hi Jamie,
Yes it would, since the record of learning reports are all embedded report builder reports you get any new report builder functionality for free.
Simon
Hi Jamie
So, lets talk! Our high level requirements are:
- HTML editable header, where:
- URL's remain clickable when opened with PDF reader software
- We can place images with some filter or advice text that highlights any used image formats that won't work with the PDF creating code
- Some lookup codes for user profile fields, as used in the F2F emails, so we can personalise the report e.g. <name>, <manager's name>, <membership number>
- Direct URL link (maybe we can already do this?) where we can place a link (in a button) that generates the report. The use case is for all the targeted HTML blocks in our site (e.g Lawyers, Accountants, Team Leaders)
We place all our development with our support partner (we configure not code) and due to our current focus on upgrading to Totara 2.4 (target weekend of 21/22 September) it'll be October before we could meaningfully collaborate.
Perhaps, we should take the balance of this conversation offline - my email address is austen.sicnlair@ird.govt.nz
Cheers
Austen
Thank you Austen, I will contact you. I really appreciate what you have provided thus far!
Jamie