Are portals appropriate in this case?

[marianne]

I was happily doing my thing with portals until I started reading this forum, and now I've gone into complete panic mode.

Here's my situation:

We have an interview that's administered to students every three months. So far, we only have two of these interviews administered, so each student will have two interviews associated with him/her.

I have a file called Student for student demographic information, Questionnaire, and Scoring Profile. The Scoring Profile is a file that takes the values from the questionnaire and scores them.

I need to display a summary of the differences in each of the question from the first time the test was administered, to the second one.

So, for example, if I have a question called "Are you happy now?"

I need to display it in this fashion:

Question: Are you happy?

Answer:

3/14/2001-----Yes-----20

6/14/2001-----No-----0

The questionnaire is pretty gigantic in size, so what I've done is taken about ten questions, and put them to a page with each question having a portal right below it displaying a summary of the information. So on each page, I have at least ten portals.

Again, each portal will contain a max of four fields, and so far only two records (which will grow to at most 18 records).

Am I doing the right thing here, or is there a simpler solution that I'm not thinking about? I need to have all the information displayed in a report-like fashion.

Thanks!

[keshalyi]

Well, you'll want to change it a little bit, I should think to get around printing portals. Luckily, the information you've presented offers a somewhat simple solution, as far as I can see. As follows:

Lets say you have 3 questions on the interview: Do you like Sylvia Plath? Who is your mother? and Care for a Cheez-it?, and you ask this interview any number of times. What you need is some table that has all these answers in it, so that you don't have to portal to them. My solution would be to build three tables:

A) Subjects

Questions

C) Answers

Subjects would hold the information about each individual person whose being given the interveiw. Questions is a Value table, holding a static list of questions asked in the interview. Answers is a list of records of the answers given, where each record stores a) the id of the question answered by this answer, the id of the answerer and c) the answer.

Make sense so far?

Now, you just build a report in the Answer table, that summarizes by student, then sub-summarizes by question!

Most likely, whatever structure you have your data in now, it could be moved to this structure. I don't know if it would get in the way of any other functions, but it does offer some strong advantages over the portal option: you can add questions without rebuilding the reports, you can take the interview as many or as few times as you like, and still have the reports format nicely, etc.