Timothy E. Archer

From the expect man page:

Expect is a program that “talks” to other interactive programs according to a script. Following the script, Expect knows what can be expected from a program and what the correct response should be. An interpreted language provides branching and high-level control structures to direct the dialogue. In addition, the user can take control and interact directly when desired, afterward returning control to the script.

At the institution for which I work, I am responsible for our Sungard HE Banner ERP system. One of the development tasks that I was presented with was to automatically run a binary file at 10pm every night. The challenge was that this program was interactive and required the user to input answers to prompts. This sounded like a perfect use of the Unix program expect.
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At the University for which I work, we had a need to integrate our Sungard HE Banner ERP system with Barnes and Noble (our outsourced bookstore) to process book vouchers, and with our credit card processing API (Intellipay). Both of these applications required us to post charges and payments directly to the student’s account.

With our Barnes and Noble integration, the process works as such: continue reading…

Are you a Sungard HE customer using the Banner ERP Software?
Have you ever wanted to know how to easily select a student’s account balance?

Well, all of a student’s charges and payments are held in the tbraccd table. Banner defines the tbraccd table as the “Account Charge/Payment Detail Table”. Furthermore, each entry in the tbraccd table has a specific detail code defined in the tbraccd_detail_code column. This column relates to the tbbdetc table, which Banner defines as the “Detail Charge/Payment Code Definition Table”.

Essentially, the tbraccd table stores the type of transaction, and the transaction amount. The tbbdetc table tells us whether that transaction type is a charge or a payment. continue reading…