From ITS Wiki

Centre Mugbook

Each year, Centre produces a "Mugbook", a collection of framed photos, preferred and last name, and directory information that includes students and faculty/staff. The mugbook is produced using the Odyssey PCS ID card system, which supplies the photos, some freeware programs and Cognos 8 reports. The computer being used to produce the mugbook should have the font "Andy" (sometimes known as Andy Bold) installed. Student/Staff and Faculty names will be printed in Andy size 9, and footers in Andy size 12. The font is available at Andyb.zip

When saving the final PDF, remember to save at a resolution of at least 300 dpi, which should be adequate for commercial printing.

Exporting And Resizing Photos

NOTE: It is necessary to log on to the Odyssey server through the VMware client and log into PCS User Interface directly on the server when running the photo export. Otherwise, the process will attempt to access the e:\ drive on your local machine.

The photos first need to be exported from the Odyssey PCS system. This can be accomplished by logging on to the PCS User Interface and choosing Tools... Exports.

In the Odyssey Export Wizard, choose the Photo Export as shown below and click Next.

Make sure the images are being exported to e:\images on the Odyssey server as shown in the screenshot below. Click Next. NOTE: If you intend to save any changes to the Photo export, (ex: changing the plan types included in the filter) make sure you click Browse and browse to the images folder to find photo_export.txt! If you do not do this, Photo Export may fail, with a "File not found" error, without exporting any images.

In the Select Export Fields screen, you should see the ID field and photo field. Click Next. NOTE: If you intend to save any changes to the Photo export, (ex: changing the plan types included in the filter) make sure you highlight Photo, choose Properties, and explicitly browse to the e:\images directory. If you do not do this, the path will save as e:\\\\images\\\\ and the export will fail! Otherwise, click Next.

In the Select Patrons screen, you can edit or add filters that restrict the number of photos exported. Typically, the Plans are filtered to the 7 student/faculty/staff plans. You can view or edit the filters by highlighting the appropriate line and clicking the Select button.

You can ignore the Select Sort Order and Define Header and Footer screens. These settings do not apply. Click Next to skip these screens.

In the final screen, Save & Run, you have the option of saving changes to the export, saving the export under a new name, and the option to run the report. To run the report a single time with your current settings, leave Run This Export Now checked and click Finish.

If all goes well, when the export finishes running, you should see newly exported images with the appropriate date and time stamps in the e:\images folder on the Odyssey box. In my screenshots, the Z drive has been mapped to this location.

The photos will then need to be resized and saved as bmp files on the Koios box. They must be located in c:\Program Files\Cognos\c8\webcontent\samples\mugbookimages. In my screenshots, the Y drive has been mapped to this location. The final size should be approximately width = 296 pixels and height = 380 pixels. This allows for a reasonable resolution while keeping file sizes smaller.

The freeware program PIXresizer works well to batch resize the pictures. The files can be resized, moved and saved as bmp files in one fell swoop. The program takes about 1 hour to process nearly 2500 photos.

At this time, there is no need to rename the files to remove the leading/padding zeroes in the file name. The Cognos 8 reports will be able to resolve "000000003.bmp" as belonging to the employee with the id number 3 for example.

NOTE: It would be best to clean out the target directory before moving the pictures, to force newer photos into the directory. Otherwise, you may find old student ID pictures or Buck Center member pictures appearing for staff.

You can easily find out which employees are "missing" by right-clicking the image frame and looking at properties. Save the Photo Not Available graphic in the appropriate directory with a filename in the idnumber.bmp format.

Generating the PDF Files

Cognos 8 reports now generate the PDF files. There are separate reports for the Employee Mugbook and the Student Mugbook. The employee version uses the HR Package and will show every employee with an active classification in hremp_rec.cl, except for the employees explicitly filtered out on the parameters page. The report will produce pages of photos with the employee preferred names below. You also have the ability to run the Employee Mugbook in sections, by last name. For example, running it from A to N will produce the pages containing all employees with last names beginning with the letter "M". This is to avoid the "timeout" error when too many pictures are being sent to the PDF file. A bit of finagling is necessary (deleting the last partial page of pictures and running the second section beginning with the appropriate employee) to get the sections to come together seamlessly. Keep in mind that if the page "breaks" in the middle of the same last name (ex: Bob Miller and Mandy Miller), you will need to start the second run at "Miller" and filter out Bob, so he does not appear twice.

You will see the pictures on screen, with the names beneath in Andy font. You may notice a white gap between the right side of the picture and the frame surrounding the Table Cell containing the picture when viewing in HTML format. Or with thicker borders, the right side of the frame may appear to be missing. This will not be a problem when the file is exported to PDF format by clicking the PDF button, marked in the screenshot below.

If you wish to change the border in Report Studio, remember to select the Table Cell, not the image. When you export to PDF format, the font will change to Tahoma, the standard "export font" of all things Cognos 8, evidently.

Thanks to a little report editing done at the end of the 2008 Mugbook creation, there is a "calculated capfname" field that drives the sorting, so employees and students with names like "de Gatica" should appear in the proper order, in the D section. We also decided to remove the padding around the Repeater Table Cell, put a 3pt border on the Table Cell around the image for more of a "filmstrip" look and so the pictures could be slightly bigger when exported to PDF.

Once the PDF files are created, it's quite easy to use Adobe Acrobat (full version) to pull the PDF files together in the proper order, and also to delete any extraneous pages (ex: partial pages at the ends of sections in the Employee exports). If printing the pages or eliminating extra white space before saving, you can use the Crop feature in Acrobat, and have it remove the white space around the edges. 2009 distribution may involve placing the PDF on a publicly accessible share/website and allowing people to download, not a physical printing. One possibility is the Documents portlet on CentreNet, which shows up on both Student and Staff tabs.