Am i dreaming too big for a beginner

[smithyonline]

i am trying to build a database for a dance school i have created a table for the students and one for the classes then linked them with a enrollment table.

what i want to do is create monthly invoices per student listing the classes they attend that month so want the invoice to pick up that if a class is held on a Monday i want the invoice to pick up how many Mondays there are in a month if that makes sense

i also want invoices to be recorded when created so payment can be logged to highlight outstanding bills

might be more than 5mins work

thanks in advance
Adam

 

[gemma-the-husky]

you probably ought just to have a table recording the classes attended by each student, rather than trying to do this with some fancy code.

 

[smithyonline]

i have a table to list studentID and ClassID so recording the classes students attend

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I mean the actual attendance.

then you can just bill per attendance with no fancy calculations.

I mean what about vacation weeks when there are no classes - if you just use a calendar to count weeks how do you allow for such weeks? What if someone joins late? or abandons the course?

 

[Dinger_80]

Another idea may even be instead of worrying about what day the classes were on is to just keep track of the classes that were attended and in the tables with the class information have how much each class is. You could get into more complicated matters to include keeping track of the number of classes each student took and which ones. That maybe nice to look back to see what students are showing up, plus it would allow you to then at the end of the month set up calculations for what the bill is for the month.

 

[MarkK]

It's not clear to me that because a class occurs on a Monday, therefore you must calculate how many Mondays there are in that month.

In fact, a student shows up at a class, which is an event that you can record. That event occurs in time and the student has a name. Later, and based on this record you keep, you can easily count how many times a student showed up between two dates. That's all you need. Whether those dates are Mondays or not is irrelevant. How many of those dates occurs inside a certain billing period, that matters.