By anthonym on

Hi everybody. I'm hoping someone might have a few minutes to help me out with this. I would say I'm an advanced-beginner Drupal user, so I'm pretty sure I can put this together, but I'm not quite sure how to get started.

My situation: I direct several music ensembles as after-school activities. I need to keep very careful records of student attendance, including how much time (percentage) a student spends in each rehearsal. I figured I could create a (CCK) content type called "rehearsal" which would have the start/end times (these are generally the same each week, but vary occasionally) by using either Date or Event modules. I was planning to use taxonomy to specify which ensemble the rehearsal is for. I'm planning make each student a site user and to use Content Profile to record some info about each one.

Then I get stuck. How do I record the arrival/departure time of each student for each rehearsal? Do I need to create a node for each "attendance event"? 10 rehearsals for a 70 member chorus would be a lot of nodes to deal with.

Can anyone give me a few tips on where to go with this?

Anthony

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jim0203’s picture

jim0203 commented

Think of it in terms of the events that are happening in the real world. You have one content type for the rehearsal, and you have user accounts representing students. You need another content type for "attendence" which contains a node reference field from which rehearsal can be selected, and a start and end time entered. These nodes will be created by the student.

That does give quite a few nodes, but from the database point of view nodes are pretty lean creatures. 700 nodes (representing the attendance of 70 students at 10 rehearsals) is not huge, especially when the content types are pretty minimalist. Drupal.org has over half a million nodes!

If you want to log students presence or otherwise at a rehearsal yourself, rather than getting them to do it from their own user accounts, my http://drupal.org/project/schoolreport module might be of use when it's up and running (should be pretty soon).