Hi, td.
It always helps me to get started by thinking about things or people (which
become tables) and relationships.
In your case, you have a Students table, and ClassEvents. These tables have
a many-to-many relationship--many students attend each class event, and each
student attends many class events. This means you need an intermediate table
in a one-to-many relationship with each to represent it. This suggests the
following structures:
Students
----------------
StudentID AutoNumber or Integer (Primary Key)
FName Text
LName Text
Phone Text
....other student-specific attributes
ClassEvents
--------------
ClassEventID AutoNumber (Primary Key)
ClassDate Date/Time
....any other class date-specific fields
StudentClassEvents (Intermediate Table)
------------------------
StudentClassEventID AutoNumber (Primary Key)
StudentID Integer (Foreign Key to Students)
ClassEventID Integer (Foreign Key to ClassEvents)
AttendanceStatus Integer (Foreign Key to AttendanceStatus) or Text
LunchStatus Integer (Foreign Key to LunchStatus) or Text
There are to be (number of class days) * (number of students) records in
StudentClassEvents. Since you will likely enter the attendance of all
students on a particular day, rather than all the days for a particular
student, build a main form on ClassEvents with a continuous subform, linked
on the ClassEventID. Since the name fields are not in the StudentClassEvents
table, base the subform on a query of the StudentClassEvents and Students
tables, linked by the StudentID. Select all of the fields of the
intermediate table, and a calculated field for the name: FullName:[LName] &
", " & [FName], sorted in Ascending Order.
The subform need not have all of the fields in the query, however, just the
FullName and the status fields.
This type of application should be "preloaded", that is, first load all of
the class days into ClassEvents, and then run an insert query to insert
records into StudentClassEvents, one for each student for each day. Then you
can use your form to update the status fields each day.
Hope that helps.
Sprinks
