Question

Photo of Niyi Osibeluwo

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Assigning preprinted tag numbers and displaying it during check in/out

5

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to use a preprinted tag during check in. My goal is that once a child is checked in, the screen will display the tag number on the screen. The staff will then hand the physical tag to the parent or guardian. The reverse will occur during check out.


Now, someone advised that the way to create this was through Person Attributes. So, I created a general attribute (see image below)

glory tag.PNG 

Questions:


  1. How do I get it to display on the screen during check in or check out?
  2. Is it possible to have it configured such that each child that will be signed into a particular class (area) will be assigned a tag number from a pool. For instance, Glory Class has been configured as an area and there are physical tags that start from 01 to 50 for each class. So G01 to G50 for Glory class and V01 to V50 for victory class. I want that any child that will be checked in to Victory class will be assigned V01 if he's the first. The next child will be assigned the next number in the series under that class/area
  • Photo of Airsay Longcon

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    Hello Niyi,

    Following this closely as a similar solution is required here. Mind my asking what ministry this is being used for?

    PS: I'm in Nigeria too

  • Photo of Niyi Osibeluwo

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    Hi Airsay,

    The ministry is The Lighthouse Church.

    Have you already implemented Rock in your ministry?

    Cheers

  • Photo of Daniel Hazelbaker

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    Hi Niya,

    Adding a post here for completeness even though we already discussed this briefly on Slack.

    Rock is unfortunately not built to accommodate that kind of setup. Your best bet would be to find a sort of middle ground between how Rock wants to do things and what you are capable of doing. Something like the following might give your team a place to start discussing how best to do this (we do something similar, but with the labels that Rock generates itself):

    1. Use Rock Check-in like it would normally be used, but without labels since you don't have printers.

    2. Give the 50 "Glory Class" tags to the teacher(s) in that room. Each room would also have a clipboard with a sheet of paper with the following columns: "Tag #", "Child Name", "Picked Up?"

    3. When the parent arrives at the room with the child you hand then the next available tag (they don't even really need to be in order) and write on the clip board the TAg # and child name.

    4. When parent returns and hands the teacher the tag, they ask who they are picking up and then the teacher looks at the clipboard to make sure they are picking up the right kid (this helps protect against parent dropping the tag and some random stranger picking it up and going to that room to take the kid).

    5. When the child is "handed off" to the parent put a check mark, time, whatever, in the "Picked Up?" column to help indicate that the kid has left your care.


    Depending on how strict you want to be you can add or remove columns from the clipboard at will (parents name for example), use a white-board, whatever works best. Sorry Rock doesn't fit perfectly with your needs for that, but hopefully this helps your team come up with some creative solutions to solve the problem.

  • Photo of Niyi Osibeluwo

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    Thanks a lot Daniel for this very elaborate work around. I am exploring this with my team to see if this will work for us. One thing that is different in our setup is parents currently check in on the ground floor then climb to the 2nd floor and release the child to a teacher in the hallway who then takes or guides the child to his/her class.

    I'm so sorry to belabour this issue but a lot of ideas have been popping into my head and I need to run them through else I'll go crazy. Forgive me if I don't use the right phrases and terminologies.

    1. Create a person, global or general attribute for each area that is made up of a list of values (G01-G50). These values represent the tag numbers and can be serially called or assigned once a child is checked into that class. (I haven't figured out how to configure this last part yet but I have already tried configuring an attribute with these values). Next, get this attributed to be called like {1}, {2} and {3} is called up and displayed as the check in and check out messages (So, for example, this message will be modified - {0} was checked into {1} in {2} at {3}).

    2. My second idea is if the first doesn't work and it will involve designing a workflow that will run and popup the values for each class either during the check in process and separately.

    3. The third idea involves using labels but this time instead of getting it to print to a physical printer it will be sent to the ZPL printer emulator which I assume works like a PDF printer. If I can get that to work then it will involve somehow configuring the printer to pop up on the screen with the label number after check in. Obviously I will need to have configured the labels to not print random numbers but rather the custom numbers in my tags.


    Again, pardon all the many questions.



  • Photo of Daniel Hazelbaker

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    Hi Niya,

    1. I don't think you can modify that message without changing some C# code, so not sure how feasible that is for you. And I'm also not sure how you could assign them automatically as part of the check-in process.

    2. You can design a workflow that will auto-run after they are checked in, but it wouldn't be able to pop up anything. It would be a background only process. You could probably configure the workflow to auto-assign the next available number and then e-mail the name/number to a specific e-mail address. If your e-mail system is fast enough you could have another iPad sitting there with the mail client open.

    3. This might be possible, but again you wouldn't be able to assign your custom check-in code (G01) to the person until after the check-in process is done, at which point the label (even virtual label) would already have printed so you wouldn't be able to include that G01 number on the label anywhere - at least not without custom C# code changing the default behavior of the core Rock.Dll.