I have a drop-down list of school grade values 1-12. Is there a way for the grade to automatically increase by 1 each year so I do not have to go back and updates all the childrens grade every year. In other words if i set a child to be in 1st grade is there some kind of calculation I can set to make that field increase to grade 2 the following year automatically without having to manually do it myself?

You could use a calculation on the year the child was incepted versus the current year.

It would look something like:

Year(Get(CurrentDate)) - Year(student::startdate)

e.g output:

2010-2008 = 2 = Grade2

student::startdate being whatever field you already use track when a student enters the system.

This calc would be in your "Grade" field and should be unstored.

Because this will result in a zero based list you may need to add +1 to the end so that the first year = 1, and not 0.

( Year(Get(CurrentDate)) - Year(student::startdate) ) +1

e.g. output:

2010-2010 = 0 +1 = 1 = Grade1

HTW

Sounds like a design problem. Seems like you should have a related table, registrations or something. You really want to throw out all history and just change the year? Maybe that is a valid choice; but it doesn't sound like it. But we don't really know what you're doing.

I agree with Bruce, we don't know enough about your structure. I'm also wondering what happens to the Hold Backs? If this is automatic, wouldn't they show the wrong class?