About Attendance Notification Triggers

When a student is reported absent, you may wish to take action, such as notifying an advisor. To facilitate this, Campus Cafe supports database triggers for absences in two ways: Automatic notifications based on individual absences, and multiple absence notifications based on a threshold of absences, bound by a time frame.

Automatic Notification Triggers

By default, when a student is marked absent from a class, Campus Cafe will log that absence in the student's audit log, found by clicking the Last Updated timestamp in the upper right hand corner of the student's profile page:

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This now allows the Database Triggers (Admin Menu -> Database Triggers) settings to check the database table (ATSENT) looking for a change to the ABSENT column. A value of Y indicates a student is absent. The following image shows a trigger set up to check for a student being marked absent (going from * to Y value in the ABSENT column):

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Because the absence is tied to a specific class and student, the class, semester, and student information contained in workflow merge fields will all populate when the course is marked absent, if included in the email notification in the workflow that is deployed by the Activity Tracking Template tied to the Absence notification database trigger. Refer to documentation regarding creating database triggers for more information.

Multiple Absence Notification Triggers

Notifications can also be triggered based on a minimum absence threshold that occur within a configured timeframe. This means that, until that minimum absence threshold is met, the system will not post an entry to the student’s audit log. The configured timeframe is a days-based timeframe that looks backward from the current day. This means that, if set to 7, the system will always be looking at the last week.

Multiple Absence Notification Custom Controls

To configure the minimum absence threshold and absence timeframe, navigate to Custom Controls (Admin Menu → Custom Control) and search for ProgramId “ABSENT_NOTIFY” There is one sequence for this ProgramId and two parameters for the sequence.

ABSENT_NOTIFY 1,1 controls the minimum number of absences required for the system to add an entry to a student’s audit log

ABSENT_NOTIFY 1,2 controls the maximum number of days, backward from the current day, that the system will accumulate absences to add an entry to the student’s audit log.

Configuring Multiple Absences Notification Trigger Email

The multiple absences notification will not automatically send an email upon posting an entry to a student’s audit log. The audit log entry is able to be configured to send via a Database Trigger. To configure a Database Trigger, the table name is ATSENT, the field is ABMULT, and the from and to values should both be an asterisk (*).

Database Triggers are connected to Activity Tracking Templates, which have workflows to send emails, texts, or attach student notes.