Student Parking

Student Parking

Web Registration and Payment

Version 2

8/8/23 - Dartp - Added Spillman lot for all students.

This web application allows students to submit a parking registration form, identifying the vehicle they will drive to campus, the person to whom that vehicle is registered, and choice of an appropriate parking permit type.  Additionally upon registration the student can indicate whether they would like to pay immediately by credit card, or go to the Office of Student Accounts to make their payment.  The student can submit their payment to any of the Canisius supported credit cards, currently Master Card, VISA or Discover.  The payment is authorized in real time by the Touchnet Payment Gateway.  Once the payment is authorized, the payment is applied to the appropriate Banner tables for accounts receivable (Student Accounts) miscellaneous receipt.  The amount of the payment is governed by the type of parking permit they choose.

Enhancements for version 2 include limits placed on the number of certain permits that can be sold, implementation of a waiting list for those whose desired permit has been sold out, and availability of a “summer only” permit.

Students are offered a choice of permits based on their resident status and for the summer only permit, whether we are in the months of May through August.  The classifications are  dependent on data entered for student (sgbstdn_levl_code), registration (sfrstcr credit hours greater than 11 for full-time, 11 or less for part-time), and housing (slrrasg_bldg_code for the bldg to which Residence Life has assigned the student for the term code in question).

Considering the chart above:

• The table above is represented in data in the table wbfs013.  It contains the data above as well as prices for each classification of permit.  If the prices change, they must be changed in wbfs013.  Presently there is no data maintenance form for this table; it would need to be changed by a programmer.
• A resident is defined as someone who has been assigned a room by Residence Life, from which we also ascertain the building (slrrasg building code).
• A commuter is defined by the fact that the student has not been assigned a room by Residence Life.
• The undergraduate/graduate levels are defined by sgbstdn level code.
• Full time is defined as actively registered for more than 11 credit hours.
• Any resident will be offered choices according to their building.
• Residents of buildings with limited permits will be offered the privileged (limited) permit, as well as a choice to buy a regular D permit.  If the limit has been reached (i.e. that type of permit has been sold out), they cannot buy that permit but are offered to be placed on a waiting list for that permit.
• There is a supporting table, wbfs014, which maps a building code to a parking code.  If a person is assigned a room, but this supporting table does not map the room to a parking code, the student will be offered codes 3, 4 and 5.  This table was initially populated with the list of buildings where rooms have been assigned in the 200530 term.  The table should be checked periodically to make sure we are supporting all buildings.
• A commuter full time undergraduate student will only be offered parking code 1.
• A commuter part time undergraduate student will be offered codes 1 and 2 in case they intend to register for additional courses and become full time.
• A commuter graduate student will be offered code 2 only.
• If we are in the summer months (May through August), everyone is also offered a summer only permit, which is a D permit prorated according to the month we are in.

GTVSDAX setup

There is one GTVSDAX row, PARKSTART, which defines the date (as of version 2 of this application, usually during the month of June) when the new parking year will start in the GTVSDAX EXTERNAL CODE field.  This date is used to control when students may begin purchasing full year permits.  A date in the future during the months of May, June, July or August will cause the web application to ONLY offer summer only permits.  Once this date is reached, the application will begin offering full year permits according to the classifications described above, as well as summer only permits during the months of May through August.

 5/15/19 - Added functionality for Summer Only parking.   Entering the year in the translation code field on GTVSDAX now controls the year being processed on wbrs002.   This is necessary because in May, Kevin will change the PARKSTART date to mid June.  This allows the purchase of summer only parking tickets.   Those tickets will have the year prior to this year so we need to be able to process previous year data.

Additionally, this parking start date is used to designate the parking registration year (the year portion of the date), the previous parking registration year used for summer only permits (the year portion of the date minus one year), and to calculate the term code against which we check full-time status, and dorm residency in order to offer the appropriate parking permit choices to the student.  In this term code calculation, the switchover from Fall to Spring occurs as of November 1, and the switchover from Spring to Fall occurs once the parking start date has passed in the May through August time frame mentioned above.

In the months from October through the next parking start date, we prorate the permit price by accumulating a discount of 1/12 of the full fee for each subsequent calendar month from October on.

Web Application Forms

Upon arriving at the URL for student parking, the student is presented with the CAS authentication form.  The authentication form uses the “registered” ldap group.  This group is updated nightly.  The student uses their Canisius NetID and password to log in.

Once they have successfully authenticated, the student is presented with the following parking registration form.

 Refer to the documentation above regarding the student’s data and the resulting parking choices they would actually be offered on this web form.

Note that the permit fees are prorated monthly from the full amount.  In August and September the program uses the full fee as entered in the Parking Classifications database table named wbfs013.  For every subsequent month, 1/12^th of the permit fee is subtracted from the full amount and rounded up to a whole dollar amount. 

All form fields except for middle initial and 2^nd line of address are required.  If any field is left blank at the time the student submits the form, the same form is redisplayed with field validation messages near the field they have left blank.  Following is an example of a form submitted with nothing filled in.

If the student had registered for parking in the year previous to the current, the vehicle registration information from that previous year is automatically filled in for them.

Under rare or unusual circumstances, the following messages could appear:

“Sorry, but we had a problem retrieving your records” – this would be a problem in looking up their information from the Banner database.

"We weren't able to properly interpret the amount to charge for your chosen parking permit.  Please report this to the Office of Student Accounts" – a problem looking up permit classification information from the Banner database.

In this case they can choose to place themselves on the waiting list by clicking on the “Wait List” button.  We then acknowledge their addition to the waiting list, which simply records their pidm, the year, the parking code they are waiting for and a timestamp indicating when they added themselves. 

They can then press continue, which brings them back to the previous screen where they can choose to buy the permit if they wish.

Note that for the privileged permit, we only offer the credit card choice.  They will not see the “Cash/Check” choice if they have chosen a privileged permit.

If they choose to pay by credit card they are presented with the touchnet processing. 

The first 4 digits of card number are validated to make sure they are using one of our supported credit card types.

If the Touchnet Payment Gateway returns an error code (e.g. invalid card number or insufficient funds) we display the error and allow them to try again.  The message displayed to them is “Your credit card transaction was NOT authorized. You can either try another credit card transaction or go to the Office of Student Accounts to pay by cash or check.”

If they press submit more than once we do not charge the card a second time, but we also display the message, "You clicked submit more than once.  You should call the Office of Student Accounts to make sure you were not charged twice and to make sure you are properly registered for parking"

Upon successful submission of this form, the student will get an acknowledgement page

Distribution of Parking Permits

Once the student has registered for parking, and either paid online by credit card or chosen to pay in person at the Office of Student Accounts, they may present themselves at the Office of Student Accounts to pick up their parking hang tag.  At this point, the teller will verify whether the student has paid, collect the payment if not paid, and enter the number of the hang tag being given to the student and the receipt number in Banner form wbrs002.

Reports

BFSR024

BFSR025