Beginning this year, parents will have the option to pay all fees in one fell swoop for all their students, regardless of which school they are attending. This has produced the immediate need of a family id number. While SASI does have such a number already, it unfortunately does not work between schools. Therefore, our next best option is to use some other piece of information that could be commonly accepted as a family ID number. It has been determined that the home phone number will serve that purpose.

The short of it, for those in a hurry
From this point foward, all home phone numbers entered into the student atom will require the area code. In addition, nearly all the phone numbers that were lacking the area code have had the area code added for you. (You don't have to go back into SASI and type "563" for each of your students)

The longer story, for you detail oriented folks
Would you like to know how we were able to add the area code to all those existing students?

Our primary concern was to be sure that we didn't do anything to the phone number field where we could accidentaly lose all those phone numbers. For this reason, we used a separate field to do our work. Our secondary concern was to work efficiently. Since we have some students who are open enrolled in from other communities, or parents who have a cell phone from a different city, we can't just assume that all numbers are going to be a "563" area code. That means there will be several queries to run. It it easier to run these several queries on our consolidated data set (we can change all phone numbers across the entire school district this way), then import the results into each schools' individual copy of SASI.

1. Log into the consolidated data set
2. Find and clear a field to do the work. We are a U.S. School District, so the "Province" field in ASTU is a great temporary field to do this kind of stuff.
   • CHANGE ASTU PROVINCE = " " IF PROVINCE > " "
     -Show Inactive Records
3. Copy any telephone numbers that already have the area code to the province field.
   • CHANGE PROVINCE = TL IF TL > 1000000000
     -Show Inactive Records
4. Since we are concerned only with those telephone numbers that need to be "fixed", write a filter that will skip records where the phone number has an area code.
   • SKIP STATUS IF PROVINCE > " "
     -Show Inactive Records
5. We now need a query that will show us the relavant information on which to base our series on Mass Change queries. It will serve to check our progress as we whittle away at the pile of numbers to fix. This query will show the first 3 numbers of the 7 digit telephone number, and what the new number will be, along with the original telephone number and city.
   • DISPLAY ASTU {PF=TL/10000} {NEW=TL+5630000000} TL CY
     -Show Inactive Records

     When you run the query, try sorting it by the "PF" column. You will notice that the numbers are grouped together, and will have several occurances within the same city. It is safe to assume that each of these will be in the same area code. A prefix number in a different city may be in a different area code, however. (In some large cities, there could be an area code change within the same city, so you may want to display the zipcode or even the address field as well.)

6. Next, create a set of new phone numbers (complete with area code) in the Province field based on what you are seeing in the query results from step 5. For example:
   • CHANGE ASTU {PF=TL/10000} PROVINCE = {TL+5630000000} IF CY = "Muscatine" AND PF IN [260, 262, 263, 264, 288, 299, 506, 554, 571, 607, 649]
     -Show Inactive Records

     Notice that this query is re-calculating the 3 digit prefix, storing the value in an entity I've called "PF" and then using "PF" in the IF portion of the query. In addition, since we have a filter in place to skip any record that has a value in the Province field, each time you run this query for a city / prefix combination, they will be automatically filtered off, so you are only dealing with what's left. All you have to do is re-run the query from step 5! Continue in this fashion until you have no more phone numbers to fix.

7. We're not done quite yet. Remember, we've placed the new numbers in the Province field, so we now need to get them back over the the Telephone field. First, take your filter out of the filter folder. If you are doing this for a single school, a simple MASS CHANGE will do:
   • CHANGE ASTU TL = PROVINCE IF TL < 1000000000
     -Show Inactive Records

   Otherwise, we will do this by exporting the student id number and the newly formatted telephone number, and import them into each individual copy of SASI.

   • EXPORT ASTU ID PROVINCE IF TL < 1000000000 AND PROVINCE > " "
     -Show Inactive Records

     Save this file as "phone.txt"

8. There are different ways of importing data on separate installs of SASI. If your installs are all within the same building or you are on a fast network connection, you could place phone.txt in 1 location and import it from there. I prefere to copy the file to each location so that when I run the import, the data being imported is sitting on the same physical hard drive, and it not having to be pulled across the network. How you decide to do it will depend on your environment and personal preference. Here's how I do it.
   • Copy the file to each location. I use a batch file to do this for me.
   • Configure each of your import atoms.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
   • Click the Process Map Group button, and watch all your telephone number fields be repopulated with correctly formatted numbers!