Schedule Maker?

[Gabzilla]

Here is a situation I am having trouble wrapping my brain around...

Background info: I am setting up a database to help organize a conference we are putting on for some (500 or so) students. During one portion of the day, the students choose 2 sessions from a possible 12. That portion of the day is actually split into 3 periods. They will attend a topic in each of two periods and eat lunch during a third period. Lunch could be during period 1, 2, or 3. The students will be split as evenly as possible in each of the three lunch periods.

And the story continues...

I will not know how many students have selected each topic, so therefore will not know how many sessions of each topic there will be, until after registration. For example, if 50 students sign up for "personal finance", then there will be 3 sessions. If only 18 sign up, there will be only one. I envision there could be 1 to 6 sessions for each topic.

My dilemna...

Filemaker is working excellent for everything else related to this project, but my skills are not sufficient to understand how to do what I want it to do, the best way to start down the path of getting to where I want to be, or if Filemaker is just not up for the task.

What I want to do...

After the registrations come in, I will make a determination of how many sessions of each topic there needs to be and set up a schedule. What I need to be able to do, is to assign each student to the three periods. Ideally, if there are 60 kids registered and there are three sessions, then each session gets 60 kids assigned to it. There is flexibility in that the number of students per session is not a fixed number, i.e. it could be 15 or 25.

Ultimately I want to be able to print out a schedule for each student, showing what topic (or lunch) they will be doing during each of the three periods. This portion in question is just one part of a much larger schedule.

Can anyone offer any help or suggestions?

Can it be done?

I realize that for some of the kids there is going to be a conflict, but if it could be scripted to sort out the majority of the kids correctly, it would still be a help.

I am currently using FM6 for this, but could use 7 or 8 if it would help.

[defectivo]

Somtime last year, I made a database to organize my school's career day in which students filled out option forms where they picked what 3 sessions they would like to attend (there were something like 20 available).

I set it up so a class of studens could go into a computer lab and enter these results from forms into the database.

As results were entered in, each session was set up with 30 available seats or spaces for students to go into. The system would count down based on how many people got added to it.

In the end stage, I ran off personalized timetables for each student using a report (4 timetables per page to save space). This was really quick and very easy to deliver to students, because I exported their homeroom, grade, first and last name out from the Student Information System. That also allowed us to enter information one class at at a time.

I would be more than happy to share this with you if it suits your needs...just gotta find it.

It was a FileMaker 4.1 database at the time, but I think I've converted it to 5.5

Edited December 9, 2005 by Guest