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Attendance Table
I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information
database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs |
#2
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Attendance Table
On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:08:00 -0700, DUNNER7 wrote:
I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs Well, you could have a SchoolCalendar table with a date for each school day or a calendar table with a date column and another column for IsSchoolDay. There could be other columns for year_num, month_num and semester_num You would need a table for StudentAttendance with columns for calendar_date, student_id and attendance_code INSERT INTO StudentAttendance ( student_id, calendar_date ) SELECT Students.student_id, SchoolCalendar.calendar_date FROM Students, SchoolCalendar WHERE SchoolCalendar.IsSchoolDay = -1 and SchoolCalendar.year_num = 2008 and SchoolCalendar.semester_num = 1; Query not tested. You now have an attendance roster for every student for every school day in the semester. You could make a form based on StudentAttendance and have a calendar control in the heading to select the date to work with. Change the forms recordsource to only show this date's attendance. You would also need queries to add new students to StudentAttendance and delete withdrawn students from StudentAttendance. Just my ideas, maybe somone else has another suggestion. |
#3
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Attendance Table
I don't know all of your circumstances, but here is something to consider.
Don't keep track of what you don't need to know. In other words, do you really need to keep track of who was present each day? A person is either absent or present, and since the vast majority of students/teachers will be present each day (presumably), then it is a lot easier to just keep track of who was absent. You might have tables like; tblPersons ******** PersonID (PK) FirstName LastName PersonType (student or teacher) other fields related specifically to each person tblAbsences ********* AbsenceID (PK) AbsenceDate PersonID (FK to tblPersons) AbsenceReason -- _________ Sean Bailey "Michael Gramelspacher" wrote: On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:08:00 -0700, DUNNER7 wrote: I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs Well, you could have a SchoolCalendar table with a date for each school day or a calendar table with a date column and another column for IsSchoolDay. There could be other columns for year_num, month_num and semester_num You would need a table for StudentAttendance with columns for calendar_date, student_id and attendance_code INSERT INTO StudentAttendance ( student_id, calendar_date ) SELECT Students.student_id, SchoolCalendar.calendar_date FROM Students, SchoolCalendar WHERE SchoolCalendar.IsSchoolDay = -1 and SchoolCalendar.year_num = 2008 and SchoolCalendar.semester_num = 1; Query not tested. You now have an attendance roster for every student for every school day in the semester. You could make a form based on StudentAttendance and have a calendar control in the heading to select the date to work with. Change the forms recordsource to only show this date's attendance. You would also need queries to add new students to StudentAttendance and delete withdrawn students from StudentAttendance. Just my ideas, maybe somone else has another suggestion. |
#4
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Attendance Table
On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:37:01 -0700, Beetle wrote:
I don't know all of your circumstances, but here is something to consider. Don't keep track of what you don't need to know. In other words, do you really need to keep track of who was present each day? A person is either absent or present, and since the vast majority of students/teachers will be present each day (presumably), then it is a lot easier to just keep track of who was absent. You might have tables like; This is all right. It seems though that some people have a need to check off attendance against a roster. It is just a matter of how the person wants to do it. With substitute teachers it helps. An actual list is definitive. The person is on the list and not marked absent. The other way the presence is assumed by the lack of an absence entry. I guess most people would not recognize a distinction. |
#5
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Attendance Table
Apologies Michael, I mistakenly replied to your post instead of the OP's.
I see your point though, that the OP may have reasons for needing to check off a complete roster each day. -- _________ Sean Bailey "Michael Gramelspacher" wrote: On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:37:01 -0700, Beetle wrote: I don't know all of your circumstances, but here is something to consider. Don't keep track of what you don't need to know. In other words, do you really need to keep track of who was present each day? A person is either absent or present, and since the vast majority of students/teachers will be present each day (presumably), then it is a lot easier to just keep track of who was absent. You might have tables like; This is all right. It seems though that some people have a need to check off attendance against a roster. It is just a matter of how the person wants to do it. With substitute teachers it helps. An actual list is definitive. The person is on the list and not marked absent. The other way the presence is assumed by the lack of an absence entry. I guess most people would not recognize a distinction. |
#6
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Attendance Table
This is a very normal situation. The Student Attendance model is even often
used in teaching relational database design because it is one step above simple in its complexity. The typical model is: Student Table - demographics on each student Facutly Table - demographics on each faculty member Course Table - Identifies all the courses offered. Not the specific occurance of a course, but a definition of the course including prerequisits, etc. Registrations Table - This is an occurance of a Course, It defines the place, time, and Faculty who will be teaching. It may also include how many students may register. Attendance Table - This keeps track of which student attended which Class on what date. Where Class means a record in the Registrations table. -- Dave Hargis, Microsoft Access MVP "DUNNER7" wrote: I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs |
#7
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Attendance Table
Thanks, you guys all put it in simple terms...I was overthinking the design.
However when designing the "attendance table" I would imaginge that the default value would be "present" and this way someone could go down and put a check in a box if the student was absent. My question is more towards the storage of the data. Would I design a table with 182 columns by date? That seems pretty cumbersome. Thanks for your continued assistance "Klatuu" wrote: This is a very normal situation. The Student Attendance model is even often used in teaching relational database design because it is one step above simple in its complexity. The typical model is: Student Table - demographics on each student Facutly Table - demographics on each faculty member Course Table - Identifies all the courses offered. Not the specific occurance of a course, but a definition of the course including prerequisits, etc. Registrations Table - This is an occurance of a Course, It defines the place, time, and Faculty who will be teaching. It may also include how many students may register. Attendance Table - This keeps track of which student attended which Class on what date. Where Class means a record in the Registrations table. -- Dave Hargis, Microsoft Access MVP "DUNNER7" wrote: I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs |
#8
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Attendance Table
Absolutely No!
That would be desiging a spreadsheet, not a relational database. The structure should have: AttendID - Autonumber primary Key CLassID - Foreign Key To Class Table StudentID - Foreign Key to Student Table AttendDate- The date of attendance. Attended - Boolean You do not prepopulate the table. You design a form so that when you are ready to enter attendance for the day, a query creates the records at that time and you just check whether the student attended that day. Attended = True as the default is probably reasonable. -- Dave Hargis, Microsoft Access MVP "DUNNER7" wrote: Thanks, you guys all put it in simple terms...I was overthinking the design. However when designing the "attendance table" I would imaginge that the default value would be "present" and this way someone could go down and put a check in a box if the student was absent. My question is more towards the storage of the data. Would I design a table with 182 columns by date? That seems pretty cumbersome. Thanks for your continued assistance "Klatuu" wrote: This is a very normal situation. The Student Attendance model is even often used in teaching relational database design because it is one step above simple in its complexity. The typical model is: Student Table - demographics on each student Facutly Table - demographics on each faculty member Course Table - Identifies all the courses offered. Not the specific occurance of a course, but a definition of the course including prerequisits, etc. Registrations Table - This is an occurance of a Course, It defines the place, time, and Faculty who will be teaching. It may also include how many students may register. Attendance Table - This keeps track of which student attended which Class on what date. Where Class means a record in the Registrations table. -- Dave Hargis, Microsoft Access MVP "DUNNER7" wrote: I am trying to design a student/faculty attendance table for my information database for a school I run. I would like to track the attendance for about 300 students and 50 faculty. This would be a daily event and the default value would be "present". My question is how could i desgin a form/table to enter this data on a daily basis and record it under a specific date? Would I need a table for each date (which would make about 182 of them) or is there a way to share this data with an excel table? I think if someone talked about this with me or gave me a direction to start that I would be able to get started. Thanks Del Dobbs |
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