The Find My Counselor Portal offered by Slate is a highly functional and versatile tool that can be seamlessly added to your institution's database using Suitcase. This portal has been specifically designed to cater to the needs of students by providing them with a user-friendly interface to quickly and easily locate their designated counselor. To access this information, students input the name of their high school, which will then prompt the portal to display the relevant information. The Find My Counselor Portal is fully customizable and can be edited to suit your institution's specific needs.
Best Practices
A good understanding of HTML/CSS and Javascript is necessary to configure this portal.
Prerequisites:
- Organization Staff Assignment Field and Rules
- Follow the Staff Assignment Automations section of the Knowledge Base, with the scope of Organization instead of Person
- Content Blocks for staff members
Configuring the Form
Once the Find My Counselor Portal has been imported via Suitcase, navigate to the form, Find My Counselor that drives the search to set it to Active. By default, the form contains five fields: High School, High School CEEB Code, Search Button, Instruction Block, and Portal Key (Hidden).
You can customize the labels on these fields based on your institution's desired language. However, several elements are referenced in the custom script that you should not edit—specifically, the export key for the CEEB Code field and the Portal Key field. The custom search button and the instruction block also use some custom HTML/CSS in the source code.
Search Button:
<div>
<button id="lookup">Search</button>
</div>
Instruction Block:
<div id="results" style="margin-top: 30px;">
Your Counselor will be revealed! Click <em>'search'</em>
</div>
Custom Javascript:
var fetchData = function(){
var ceeb = form.getValue('ceeb');
var portal = form.getValue('portal');
return (FW.Lazy.Fetch("/portal/" + portal + "?cmd=search&ceeb=" + ceeb, $("#results")));
}
$("#lookup").bind("click", function(){fetchData()});
Custom CSS:
.default { display: none; }
This script serves two purposes. First, it hides the standard "Submit" button to ensure no confusion with our "Search" button. Second, when a student clicks the "Search" button, it will pull the value out of the CEEB field, go out and fetch results from our portal using the inputted CEEB, and then places that result into our instruction block with id="results". The portal from which the results are fetched is determined by the portal key entered as the default value of the Portal Key (Hidden).
Editing the Query
Editing The Views
Tip
This portal does not need to stand on its own. If you want to incorporate the Find My Counselor functionality into a different portal, check out our example Event Portals in Custom Portals. If you incorporate the Find My Counselor functionality in a different portal, you need to change the default value of the Portal Key (Hidden) to point to that new portal.