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Posted

Hi Everyone,

I have a database that tracks daily attendance of students. I currently use just one field on each student record called attendance log. Everytime the student attends class I have a script that pastes the current date into this field so it ends up looking like

2/15/2005

2/16/2005

2/18/2005

etc.

What I was wondering is if I should keep doing what I am doing or if I should make an attendance table and create a new record for each time the student attends? I didn't originally do it this way because we have a little over 100 students and average about 30-40 attending each day. Would that be too many records if I did it that way? I would love to hear any suggestions or opinions.

Thank you,

Tanner

p.s. Filemaker 7 networked in a mixed environment.

Posted

Yes, your current design is not very good for tracking attendance. It's kind of hard to summarize data from your one text field.

I like using a portal for relating to an attendance file (I use a separate Attendance file so I can easily clone it when it's time to start fresh for the new school year.) Each day, I import the currently enrolled students into the attendance file and set the dates. They are then accessed from a Room table through an attendance portal, related by Room and Date.

You might also find this thread about attendance tracking interesting:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=105646

Posted

Thank you for the quick reply. I thiink I will try and change it so that I have a seperate attendance table. I do have one more question. One of the requirements of my system is I need to be able to see how many times a student has attended class between certain dates. For example I need to have my list of students and see how many times between 02/05/2005...03/02/2005 each student has attended class. Any ideas on the best way to accomplish this?

-Tanner

Posted

You could use a traditional report run in the Attendance table, using sub-summaries to count the records for each student. Or you could try a more dynamic approach using FM7's multi-criteria relationships (with range operators for the dates.) The sub-summary report is great if you just need to print the data. Setting up the range relationship is good if you need to see the attendance for the specified range in a portal, to work with the data in browse mode.

Posted

O.K. I have a working example of the range relationship but I don't quite know how to convert it to a format that I want as far as readablility. The way I want it to look is...

John Do 03/01/2005 - 03/06/2005 5 Times

Jane Do "" "" 4 Times

etc.

My two date fields will actually be global fields in the header so I can choose the range for all records at once. What I want to get away from is having john do show up in the list each time he has attended class with the date he attended. So it would be the names only listed once and then just say how many times they attended in that timeframe.

Thanks for all the help.

Posted

Put your global date fields in the Student file, and add a calc field:

Attendance Count by Range (calculation, number result) = count(Attendance by Range::Present)

This assumes the name of your TO via the range relationship is "Attendance by Range."

Then use a Student layout in list view to show the Student Name and Attendance Count by Range.

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