Filling in the blanks

[auhstry]

Okay...I'm rather new to this, so I need all the prompts I can get!

I am a teacher trying to create a database for my students, all who have failed some part of the Alabama graduation exam. Basically the information I have received from the state consists of 5 subject areas: social studies, science, math, language, and reading. For each subject there are between 19-24 objectives (like social studies objective V.1 might be the causes of the Civil War and V.II might be the effects of the Civil War). Now I have 70 students times all those objectives and that leaves me with about 2-3 thousand records.

I have already created a database "ge_scores" in filemaker, that is linked to several others (like student information, graduation objectives, etc...) For each record I get the student's social security number in from a pull down menu, then find the graduation exam objective from a pull down menu. If the student has passed that objective then I put a "M" for mastered. If the student has not passed I put in a zero "O."

Now the big question. I can put in all the "M"s for my students in about a week. Is it possible to tell filemaker to "fill in the blanks"--in other words if little Jimmy has mastered all the social studies, language, and reading objectives can I tell the computer to created the remaining records--math and science--as zeros for Jimmy all at once?

Like I said, I'm very new at this and may not be giving enough information. Maybe this is impossible or there are multiple solutions. Any direction would be great!

[ernst]

You could approach this by looping through the 'student information' database, supposing it has ONE record for each student involved.

Every student record should then have a portal to the related 'ge_scores' database, that initially shows all mastered objectives.

A second, inner, loop could then first check the available mastered objectives for each student record and then create the missing -not passed- objectives, putting a zero in the appropriate place on each created record.

I hope this 'sketchy story' helps a bit.

Feel free to ask for additional/ better explanations!

Regards,

Ernst.