Structure Advice

[cgiuk]

Before I start, can i apologise if this is in the wrong area of the forum. I didn't know where else to put it.

I'm a complete newbie to filemaker (teacher in my spare time) and i'm trying to setup a mark/grade book to store all of my pupil's marks in. The problem is that I could really do with some advice on the best way to structure it. I have 18 pupils and I will give each a grade for each piece of work we do. The problem is that i need to add new pieces of work as I go along. I can't just setup 15 fields for 15 pieces of work. I might end up doing 20 pieces. I hope this makes sense.

I'd be grateful of any advice.

[mr_vodka]

Well you should at least start with one table that stores your student info and another table that stores your assignments and grades.

Using 15 fields is a big no-no with relational design. It violates what is called 1NF or the first normal form.

Also you may want to include a year field in your students table so that you can see your students on a year to year basis. If you possibly have students that you can get in multiple years (1st-2nd grade) then you will want to further expand your database to accomdate a seperate table that stores yearly specific info.

[mr_vodka]

Also, FileMaker already has a starter solution on their website for K-12 education. I have not used it so I cant speak for it, but you should still try and do it on your own at some time just to learn if you wish.

http://www.filemakertrial.com/k-12/?ovmkt=O5M3PJVLTCEPQBRRJ5TP70JVUO

[cgiuk]

Thanks for your reply. I did look at the Filemaker K12 Starter Kit but even though it claims to have a solution to track grades, I couldn't find anything that did that in the kit.

As for building my own, I'd love to learn how to do it. I just wasn't sure how I should arrange the data.

[comment]

You need (at least) three tables: Students, Assignments and Grades. The Grades table is related to both Students and Assignments - each Grade record holds the grade given to one student for one assignments.

See here for something very similar:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/180113/

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/183639/