Before I start - can this be done? (easily)

[Jonathan Smith]

I am thinking about attempting a program to help my colleagues at
school to write their pupil reports. Each report has two sections: a
list of skills with a seies of tick boxes to show the level reached,
and an area to write a comment underneath. Each subject is slightly
different in the number of skills and their description and therefore
the position of the eomment is slightly different. I realise that I
can create different forms to resemble the layout of the different
reports and I can link these to a database to save the data. However
entering the information is not the problem.

What I want to be able to do review the reports for an individual
pupil so that as I move through their records the appropriate form is
used to display each subject. Is is possible to have a field in the
database that stores the subject name and therefore makes it possible
to view the record with the form that has been used to create it. In
other words, with a particular pupil selected it will use the History
form to show the history report and the maths form to display the
maths report and it seemlessly goes from one to the other as you cycle
through them. Obviously I will also need to print out the records for
each subject using the appropriate style of report.

Is this possible?

Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance - it will help an overworked teacher.

Jonathan Smith

[Bruce Benton[MSFT]]

I don't think it will be that difficult to implement the UI for the problem you outline. Most of the work will probably be in the database. Do you currently have a database to model this information or are you just planning that also?

[Jonathan Smith]

I don't have a database to model this information yet. I am at the planning
stage. I propose to have a user ID field which can be joined to another
database with full names and current tutor group and then have a field for
each of the skills, one for the comment, one for the subject and one for the
year.

I hope this will enable us to archive the reports and view them later.

I am open to suggestions if anyone has any that might make it easier.
"Bruce Benton[MSFT]" <bb*****@online.Microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:6B**********************************@microsof t.com...

I don't think it will be that difficult to implement the UI for the

problem you outline. Most of the work will probably be in the database. Do
you currently have a database to model this information or are you just
planning that also?

[Bruce Benton [msft]]

As a start I would look at having the following objects
in your DB

Student - Includes the unique ID and charcacterizes all
student uniqu info (first name, last name, grade, student
#, ...)

Tutor - Includes unique ID for tutor and contains data
similar to Student data for Tutor

Skill - A domain table enumerating the skills that are of
interest in your school. Fields probably include a unique
ID for each skill, a short name for the skill and a
description

StudentTutor - An association table that whose fields are
StudentID and TutorID. This table will have a record for
each student tutor relationship. This model allows a
student to have multiple tutors

StudentSkill - An associate table whose fields include
StudentID, SkillID, a score or rating, and probably a
comment field. This table will contain a record for each
skill that a student is being evaluated against.

This set of tables should provide a basic model for the
information you outlined. You report would then export
Student information to create the report header and the
evaluation section would loop through the Student Skill
table filtered for the current student and build up the
content that you care about for each student. You can
implement this system in either Access or the MSDE
database that comes with Visual Studio.NET. Access gives
you a simpler front end for any ad-hoc querying you might
want to do later, but MSDE is much better if you envision
this database ever being used by multiple clients.
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-----Original Message-----
I don't have a database to model this information yet. I am at the planningstage. I propose to have a user ID field which can be joined to anotherdatabase with full names and current tutor group and then have a field foreach of the skills, one for the comment, one for the subject and one for theyear.

I hope this will enable us to archive the reports and view them later.
I am open to suggestions if anyone has any that might make it easier."Bruce Benton[MSFT]" <bb*****@online.Microsoft.com> wrote in messagenews:6B5EFC4C-B6F3-43E7-81F4- 6B**********@microsoft.com...

I don't think it will be that difficult to implement

the UI for theproblem you outline. Most of the work will probably be in the database. Doyou currently have a database to model this information or are you justplanning that also?
.

[Antebios]

Yes. On SQL Server is a feature called OPENQUERY. Basically, you can
have tables on a different database server and query as if it were
local. You can even do joins on remote tables.

In order to use Open Queries you need to have the other database
LINKED!!!

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:41:19 -0000, "Jonathan Smith"
<j.*******@breathe.com> wrote:

I don't have a database to model this information yet. I am at the planning
stage. I propose to have a user ID field which can be joined to another
database with full names and current tutor group and then have a field for
each of the skills, one for the comment, one for the subject and one for the
year.

I hope this will enable us to archive the reports and view them later.

I am open to suggestions if anyone has any that might make it easier.
"Bruce Benton[MSFT]" <bb*****@online.Microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:6B**********************************@microso ft.com...

I don't think it will be that difficult to implement the UI for the

problem you outline. Most of the work will probably be in the database. Do
you currently have a database to model this information or are you just
planning that also?