How to make a field not-required?

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How to make a field not-required?

Rey

Hello everyone. First of all a big thanks to all the developers for such a great application. I have just started evaluating RosarioSIS on the local instance before deploying fully for our school so have a few questions/queries, please bear with me.

First of all, I wanted to know how to make the 'Last Name' field in 'Add a Student' form not-required? We have some students that go by only their first name, so is there a way to make the field not compulsory without editing the core files? Or editing the files is only way?

I checked in STUDENTS > Setup > Students Fields > General Info but there is no option to edit the top part of 'Add a Student' form?

Many thanks.

francoisjacquet

Hello Rey

There is no way to make the Last Name field not required because it is a NOT NULL field in the students table.

As a workaround, you could enter a single space in the Last Name field?

Rey

francoisjacquet Thanks for replying.

Yes, I'd have to alter the table as well and edit student.php in Students modules to remove isset() and empty() check from LAST_NAME, right? Or are there anymore checks elsewhere for LAST_NAME?

Using a space in last name is a good option too, otherwise I'd have to do the above edits after every update right?

Rey

francoisjacquet

Hello Francois, just ran into a problem while trying to import students data using xls file, it is not allowing me to import blank last name columns, the import is getting failed saying No names were found.

I even made a blank last name column putting spaces in it, it still says No names were found.

Any idea what can be done? I think I might have to hard edit the core files at last because entering close to 400 records one by one is going to take a lot of time.

Thanks.

francoisjacquet

Rey

Editing PHP and database structure is not the way to go.

RosarioSIS is built upon the assumption that the LAST_NAME field will not be null. So you may end up with other errors.

And yes, it will be a pain to update RosarioSIS as you will have to report your modifications to core every time.

Rey

francoisjacquet Thanks, yes that's what I thought.

Hope to get an option to make 'Last Name' required or not in future releases, meanwhile will keep using a space. Will post again if come across any other query.

Cheers.

francoisjacquet

Hello Rey

Yes, when importing a xls file every field of every row are trimmed (whitespace and other characters).

You'll have to put something like [nolastname] or whatever you like.

Rey

Thanks, will try and find out a way.

Rey

Update: What I did was, made a new column for Last Name in the Excel file to be imported, with a dot in it for every student as the last name. Imported it, which set the dot as the last name.

Then updated to database to replace the dot with a space.
UPDATE students SET last_name = ' ' WHERE student_id > 0;

I don't like to mess with the DB much but it was needed to be done.
Leaving it here, incase someone falls in the same situation as me.

Thanks.