a good way to separate data by semester

[dgroyal]

First, I apologize if this is the wrong area for this post, but my suspicion is that layouts will ultimately hold the key.

I have recently become responsible for maintaining the database for a school. Currently, they have a somewhat convoluted (albeit functional) set of FM databases. They have one separate database for students, one for instructors, another for classes, and another for the current semester. Each semester, they copy the last semester's database and erase all of the data.

I want to bring all of these pieces together into one database. I've started doing it, but one issue that I can see looming on the horizon is maintaining the separation between semesters for data entrants in the future. For example, when they are on the enrollment layout, I would only want student names from the current semester to be available in drop down lists, etc.

I'm curious to hear kind of big picture solutions to this. I'm not ready yet to get into the details. Is it possible to restrict certain layouts to data from the current semester only? I am thinking that I would have the layout run a script finding records from the current semester. Does this make sense? And instead of giving users access to FM's "show all records" button, I would make my own "show all records" button that performed a find for records of the current semester.

Am I on the right track, or would you suggest another approach?

Thanks a lot. Please feel free to ask questions, and I'll do my best to explain a bit better.

Dave

Edited October 29, 2008 by Guest

[mr_vodka]

I wouldnt use a seperate layout for each semester. That would be horrible from a maintenence perspective! :

What you need to do is have a found set of only the current semester or year's records. Show All Button can be scripted to do that. You could also create a different privilege set that most users could belong to that would only give access to the current year records. Then you can have an admin account/priv set that allows you to see all of them.

[dgroyal]

Yeah, that sounds good. I didn't mean to imply that I would make new layouts for each semester. What I was trying to say was that I thought the way to separate semesters would be via layout design.

I also have started reading the white paper you recommend in your signature. It's very helpful so far.

Thanks!

Dave