Release Notes

Broken transcript links now show a helpful recovery option instead of a confusing error.

If someone followed an old or mis-typed transcript link — or if a search engine crawler stumbled onto an invalid URL — NavEd was logging it as an application error and surfacing it in our monitoring. The link still failed gracefully, but the noise made it harder to spot real problems.

We've fixed this by teaching the transcript viewer to recognize obviously invalid links upfront, without querying the database at all. Valid-looking links that have no matching transcript (expired or never-existed) are now also handled quietly, with a clear message and a recovery form so users can retrieve their link by email. Genuine unexpected errors still alert our team as before.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Transcript links containing invalid tokens (e.g. bots probing random URLs) are now rejected immediately — no database query, no error alert
• Expired or missing transcript links now show a user-friendly error page with an email recovery form
• Added regression tests covering all three token states: invalid format, valid but missing record, and genuine server error

The Add Student page now tells new admins what to set up first — no more dead-end dropdowns.

When a brand-new head of school visited Students → Add Student before finishing initial setup, they would see Academic Grade, Session Year, and School dropdowns that looked broken — clickable, but empty, with no hint of what to do next. One customer spent several minutes trying to figure out why the form wouldn't accept their entry.

We've replaced the empty dropdowns with a clear yellow callout for each missing prerequisite, telling the admin exactly what's missing and offering a one-click button to go create it ("Create Academic Grade", "Manage Session Years", "Configure School"). While any of those three prerequisites is missing, the "Add Student" submit button is disabled with a subtle hint ("Complete the setup above before adding a student.") so the admin can't waste time submitting a form that was guaranteed to fail. Schools that have already finished setup see exactly the same Add Student page as before.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Replaced empty Academic Grade / Session Year / School dropdowns with a clear callout and direct setup link when the tenant hasn't created any yet
• Disabled the "Add Student" submit button while any of the three prerequisites is missing, with a helper message explaining why

The search box on the Applications page is now unmissable.

After the first iteration (2026.4.22.3), the HOD re-tested and the search still blended in — it was sitting alongside Status and School Year as just another small labeled filter in the dark header bar. We've pulled it out entirely, given it its own row spanning the full card width, bumped it to standard input size, embedded the magnifying-glass icon inside the left edge of the field (the universal "search box" affordance), and added a descriptive placeholder ("Search by name, email, or student ID...") so the user knows exactly what it searches. A subtle shadow and a teal focus ring give it further visual priority over the secondary refinement filters.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Moved the Applications search box out of the dark filter header into its own full-width row below it, visible to all user types
• Replaced the small external-icon design with a full-width standard-size input with the search icon embedded inside the left edge
• Added a descriptive placeholder ("Search by name, email, or student ID...") to communicate scope at a glance
• Added shadow and primary-color focus ring so the eye lands on it first before the Status/School Year secondary filters

Searching on the Applications page is now an obvious, visible box — not a hidden link.

A school admin reported that the search control on the Applications page was easy to miss: "The search feature gets lost in the text of the page. I wish there was a box there before clicking on it. My eyes are not drawn to it. I was looking at all the boxes to find a search option." They were right — the default table-header search looked more like a line of text than an input.

We've added a prominent search box with a magnifying-glass icon to the Applications filter bar, sitting in the same row as the Status and School Year filters. The old search widget has been removed so there's no duplicate. Typing into the new box still filters applications live as you type, and every other table feature — sorting, pagination, bulk actions, delete — works exactly as before.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Added a visible search input with a magnifying-glass icon as the first control in the Applications page filter bar, matching the styling of the Status and School Year selects
• Removed the default "Search:" widget from the Applications page to avoid duplicate search UI
• Live as-you-type filtering is preserved — typing in the new search box instantly filters the applications table

The free transcript builder now supports 8th grade courses.

Homeschool families whose kids took high-school-credit courses in middle school (Algebra 1, Geometry, a foreign language) had no way to record them in the transcript builder — the Add Course form only offered 9th through 12th grade. When an 8th-grade course is added, it now renders in its own "8th Grade" section on the transcript PDF, positioned chronologically above 9th grade, with its own GPA line in the Academic Summary.

Existing transcripts are unchanged: if a transcript has no 8th-grade courses, no empty "8th Grade" section is shown on either the on-page table or the downloaded PDF. The 8th grade header does not include a "Freshman" or similar class-year parenthetical — 8th graders are not freshmen.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Added an "8th" grade option to the free transcript builder's Add Course form
• 8th-grade courses render in their own section on both the on-page table and the PDF transcript, ordered before 9th grade
• Academic Summary table on the PDF includes an 8th Grade row when 8th-grade courses are present

A new blog post was hiding from search engines—we found it and brought it back.

Our "What Is Standards-Based Grading?" article published this week, but because of a small formatting quirk in the file, it never made it into our sitemap. Search engines like Google and Bing use the sitemap to discover new content, so without that entry, the post was effectively invisible to anyone searching for it.

The post itself was always accessible if you had the direct link, but we want every piece of content we write for educators to be as easy to find as possible. We've fixed the post and added a safeguard so that similar formatting issues in future posts won't cause the same silent disappearance.

Fixes and Improvements¶

• Restored standards-based-grading-guide to the sitemap so search engines can index it
• Added a defensive check in the blog post parser to handle formatting edge cases gracefully