Educational Databases-a problem to calculate absenteism

[edudna]

I need some help to this:

We have to calculate the total of days that students were absent of school. But when they are absent there are two options. Days that they are absent and bring all the required documents and days that are absent and they did not bring the required documents. Otherwise we have justified or not justified days of absenteism.

If we have for example the month SEPTEMBER we have to check the 15th as justified day of absenteism but we have also to prohibit the client to check 15th as not justified day in the other tab. I hope you understand. How can we prohibit the client to check the same option in the other tab.

[mr_vodka]

Well not knowing how your interface is going to be besides having a tab, you can always put a script to check it that date has already been set to an absent status or if you wanted to completely remove the date from a list of choices, you can use a filtered portal.

Please give us more info on what exactly you are looking for as well as how the user will use it.

[edudna]

I have attached a file to understand it better. The problem is that if the user check the 1th of SEP for justified days it is possible to check also the same day and in the option of no justified of course by mistake but it can be done... So the student can show more absenteism than he or she has.

Explanation file.

Absenteism.zip

[Ender]

Your example seems to be missing something (see attached).

It's hard to tell what you're doing, but I'm guessing you're using a checkbox set for the attendance for the month. This would not be a very good way to track attendance. It's much easier and more flexible to track attendance in a separate Attendance table. There would be one record for each Student for each Day. With this structure, you can use a columnar report with sub-summary parts in a layout based on the Attendance table and use summary fields to show counts for each breakdown.

[edudna]

You guessed right. If you do not mind tell me what fields can be in the attendance table. Should I use a portal to show the attendance table elsewhere?

Begginers problems, but I am learning fast how flexible is Filemaker Pro 8.5.

Pascal

[Ender]

Sure. Let's assume you have a Student table, a Class table, and an Enrollment table (a join between Student and Class). Add to this an Attendance table, with fields: EnrollmentID, ClassID, Date, PresentAbsent. The Attendance table is linked to Enrollment via EnrollmentID and linked to Class via ClassID.

With this basic structure, you can then place a portal of Attendance on an Enrollment screen, showing a history of the Student's Attendance for that Enrollment.

But for data entry, it makes more sense to have one place to enter the Attendance for all the Enrollments at once. This can be accomplished with a portal on a Class layout that uses a different relationship to the Attendance table (an additional table occurance). For this relationship, you'd have a Date field with Global storage defined in the Class table (maybe call it gDate), and the relationship would look like this:

Class <=> Attendance by Date =

Class::ClassID = Attendance by Date::ClassID

AND Class::gDate = Attendance by Date::Date

Now with this relationship in place, a portal showing its records, and the gDate field on the layout so it can be changed readily, the only thing that's needed is a way to populate the Attendance table for each day. For this, I'd recommend using a script that imports all the active EnrollmentIDs from the Enrollment table, and populates the Date field with the current date.