GradeL Blog

Thanks to the requests of a user from the forum, I’ve made a few more additions to GradeL for the next release.  Many of these are already documented in the Wiki.

Now, when a student has comments entered for the current marking period, an asterisk will appear before the student’s name as a reminder to the teacher that the comments exist.

Asterisks appear before names of students with comments.

I’ve also added more information to the OnlineGrade export file.  For those familiar with the OnlineGrades file format, the assignment category now appears between the <EALR> tags.

The next release is being prepared and should be available sooner or later.  If you’d like a sneak peak, you can download the current snapshot of the executable archive or the source archive.  However, use these at your own risk.

Many of the programs I use these day provide a feature where they will update themselves or at least check to make sure the user is running the most current stable version.  I have added the latter to GradeL.

Now, in the Help menu, there is an option to “Check for Updates“.  When this item is selected, the program uses an HTTP request to check a file on my server, which contains the latest version number and compares it to that of the version being run by the user.

Check for Updates menu item.

For those interested in the implementation, I originally just spawned an instanced of wget with the Gambas EXEC command and then opened the file, read the contents, and deleted the file.  Fortunately, after digging a little deeper in the Gambas documentation, I discovered the Gambas component gb.net.curl, which includes an HTTPClient object type.  You can use this object to retrieve an file via HTTP and store it in a string buffer.  The Gambas documentation provides a good example of what I did.

Message reports the results of the update check.

So, although GradeL will not depend on wget, it will now require two more Gambas components, gb.net and gb.net.curl.  Look for this feature in the next release of GradeL.

The latest feature addition currently in the works for GradeL is a report that displays the category averages for all students in a grid format. See the screenshot below:

Eventually, this report will also display the overall grade and allow printing. Stay tuned…