Student Progress Database Application

OK, first, I don't really see the need for the first subform, but it does no harm to be able to view a list of students for the selected Center. 

However, editing the Recordsources is not the way to go. As long as you set the The Linked fields properly for each Subform, then they should reflect the Selected record on the main form. did you use the subform wizard to embed the subforms? Did you select the Centercode as the linking fields?

As for entering the grades, You do thay in the second subform. You should have a combobox to select the Student, you already have a combo to select the course and month. Now you just need a textbox to enter the grade. 

I'm still not clear, is it 100 marks for the period spread out over each course?

Hi,

I've done a lot of hard work since your last instructions on the form. I have it to the point where both the sub forms are in sync with the combo box on the main form. For example, if I select a center code from the combo box on the main form, both the sub forms filter to reflect the center codes. The way I did this was I edited the record sources to reflect only what I needed to show on the form and filter the results.

Please have a look at the screenshot and let me know how I fared?

Now, I need to know how to give marks to each student in the second sub form. I have made a combo box in the second sub form for the user to select the course and grademonth. The user sees the name of the course, what what really gets stored is the value associated with the combo box.

Please discuss any mistakes I've made in the design and also a way to enter the marks of the students. Each course is of 100 marks maximum and out of that the instructor has to allot marks in each subject.

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Ok, First, I went back and reviewed the table structure and see that you don't have a name for the Centers only the Code. So your users will know the centers by the code. Also, you earlier indicated that you wanted start with a Center and see the students in that Center. So, yes the search combo should be selecting a center.

Second, If you aren't using comboboxes you missing out on interface design. You need to be using them. When creating a user interface, your users should type as little as possible. Instead they should be selecting from lists you provide. Foreign keys, especially, should be populated using comboboxes.

So you should be using comboboxes as I described to select the Student and Course. These will be bound to the StudentID and CourseID. They will replace the text boxes.

I don't understand why you think the Coursename will not work and why you say "we need to define each subject by name here ". You ARE storing the marks for each course for each student for each month. That's how data is stored in a relational database. The attributes of a grade are the course being graded for, the Student taking the course and the period the grade covers. So those are your fields.  It doesn't matter what the level of education. Its a matter of proper database design. If there is a maximum grade over all tests, then that can be easily handled.

Okay, I forgot one thing more. The second thing I wanted to tell you about how the application would function is I need to allot marks ranging from 1 to 100 for each of the 4 subjects (CourseHindi, CourseEnglish, CourseMath and CourseScience). Each Course is of 100 marks maximum. The teacher has to allocate students marks in a test out of the maximum marks for each subject which is 100. So, the CourseName field will actually not work here and we need to define each subject by name here and store the marks obtained by each student every month. This is not a higher education center, it is informal basic education where the students come to learn for example reading and writing. So we need to store his/her marks in each subject and print that out for every student in each of the 4 given subjects. This is how the application should work. The one described by you I think is a higher level course where each student would store values and not have fields for those values on the datasheet.

I hope all this makes sense because this application is not going to be used for any higher classes but for basic education whose requirements are not very high-end.

Please let me know what you think about this.

Scott this an excellent description on combo boxes and their properties. This description offers characteristics of combo boxes in great detail. Thank you for taking the effort and time to give a wonderful explanation.

The combo box in question on the form is a search combo box with center codes. So the user selects a center code (a number from 1 to 25) because there are 25 of these centers in operation right now. So I created a combo box which lists these codes which the user selects. This filters the first sub form bound to the Students table like you said in your previous instructions. Other than this combo box, I use no other combo box on any of the forms neither the sub forms or the main form. Also the fields in the Code table are: CenterCode, TeacherID, YearStarted, Address, MainLeaderName, Org and AgeGroup. As I use a combo box to show users only the codes 1 to 25 of the centers, we don't need to store the TeacherID anywhere as it doesn't need to be stored. Other than this, no other field in the Centers table needs to be stored and hence the description of the combo box you just described above should not apply in this case. Since you did not ask me to create any other combo boxes on the form, there are no other combo boxes anywhere on the sub forms.

I am confused how to proceed. Do I have to design the sub forms having combo boxes you just described for Courses and Students? Where will these go in the form? Please discuss.