Student Attendance Records

Hi:

I'm developing a student-record system for a school (Cloud Computing) and I would like to add a student attendance worksheet to it. Thus far I have come up with a couple of ideas but I still haven't implemented any.

Is there any WA Extension that could help me do this? I'm particularly concerned about changing from one week to the next or from one month to the next and about deleting the entered attendance at the end of the month or at the end of the year. Is there a way to do the deleting automatically and not manually?

Thank you for your attention

are you looking for each student to record their attendance themselves (single record insert) or are you planning to do this as an admin task, ie have a list of all attendees and do a multiple insertion ?

Dataassist can help you achieve what you want with either of these approaches

Hi Craig:

Thank you for your reply. The task I'm looking to accomplish is the second one: An admin multiple-record insert operation, like each teacher keeping track of their own students attendance on a weekly/monthly/semester basis.

I have WA's Data Assist. Could you kindly explain the best way to develop the operation in question with it?

Thank you.

there is a solution recipe for inserting multiple records, (a bit old, but it should give you some background.)

insert_multiple_final.swf

Using this principle, i would have a recordset of students displayed in a repeat region, in a form, with for example, a check box next to each student.

(The value for the checkbox in this instance should be the student id in the recordset)

The multiple insert record behavior should allow you to insert rows into the database, only for those students whose names are checked.

If you search through the forums, you should also find examples.

Hi Craig:

Thank you for your reply. Please bear in mind that I'm in China, so there's a 7-hour time difference between us. I clicked on the link you sent me, thank you, but that doesn't seem to answer my initial question. My question isn't about inserting multiple records, but about how to keep student attendance on a daily/weekly/monthly/semester basis. Also, having the teachers entering the student info every day or week, as your example suggests, would be very cumbersome.

The idea would be to display the students' records, select whether they were present or not in the appropriate field, and then update the multiple records. Perhaps my question wasn't very clear to you. I know how to display the students' records so that the teacher can update them, but would it be possible to insert yes/no data in a different day-field of the student record to check attendance? (meaning having a DB field for Monday, one for Tuesday, etc.)

Otherwise I would have to generate a new record for each class-day, which would be OK, but would mean storing tons of records (i.e. 20 per month per student)

I hope this time my question is a bit clearer.

Thank you for your attention

Now I'm confused.

I thought what you wanted to do was something like an attendance register, where the attendance or absence of each student would be recorded each time the class is in session.

(This isn't done by individual student, but the attendance of the whole class is done every session, in one insert).

You would link this attendance table to the student table so you could see which students were present/absent on any given day

Are you saying that you want to look at each student individually and insert their attendance/absence that way? that seems like more work to me

Hi Craig:

Thank you for your reply. Frankly, I don't seem to understand what you understand for "attendance records". In my view, it means having a record of a student's attendance to different classes across the duration of a week/month/semester, not just one day. The idea would be to be able to retrieve those records at the end of the week/month/semester to asses each students attendance to a class.

As I'm conversing with you I'm getting some ideas about this, but I would still like to read your suggestions.

Thank you for your attention

  In my view, it means having a record of a student's attendance to different classes across the duration of a week/month/semester, not just one day.  

attendance for the week / month or semester is a larger view that relies on the granular attendance for each day.

You cant calculate weekly attendance with out first knowing daily attendance.

The strategy of using a linking table to track attendance on a daily basis is the best approach.

Thanks for you input Jason.

Here's what I would do salaroche , if I were to record the attendance of a class for a year.

Each day (or session) , have a form as described earlier, to log the attendance of the class, by date, checking attendance against each student name.

(with a class of 30, for example, this would insert up to 30 rows into your attendance table, but you only need to do it once per session.

Over time, you build up the attendance history of each student.

You could then query this attendance table, filtering by student name or date parameters or whatever other criteria you need, to find out who attended and when.

Hope this helps

Jason, Craig:

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I understand what you're saying. I was just trying to see if it was possible to avoid entering one record per day/per student. But I guess that's not possible.

In any case, thank you for your attention.