Question Attendance Tracker

[asif pasha]

Hi all,

I am thinking to develop a tracker which will track the attendance on each day.

My fields are : Emp Id, Name, Sup Name, date1, date2, date3 ....

Where date1, date2, date3... are the current dates which will generate on a daily basis and modify the table. The row are constant unless a new employee joins.

My question is, how to hide all the past days. A form or a query should show only data which display for current day only or it should show the last coloum with couple of coloum before to it.

for ex : Emp Id, Name, dateN (Last date)

Please note :The date is in Coloum not in the row.

Thanks in advance, your help would really require on this, as i cant proceed further.

 

[spikepl]

You may want to check some suitable model here: http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/

Putting the dates in separate columns is not a good idea: it denormalizes the data, and causes lots of grief further down the road.

Later, you can choose to display data, organized by employee and dates, but that is not how it should be stored.

 

[boblarson]

1. You need to learn about NORMALIZATION. You do NOT use a structure where you have repeating fields (i.e. Date1, Date2, Date3, etc.).
Read this about normalization:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283878

2. In a properly designed database you almost never need to add new fields to a table.

 

[asif pasha]

Thanks for the reply,
I do understand creating the no of coloums is not a better idea, but the attendance needs to be captured on a daily basis, if i provide the dates in the row then it will not only increase the no of items, also create a double work for me to go on a daily basis and update the employee details for current date.

Please let me know your thoughts.


If anyone have any model of attendance tracker created in access 97, please forward.

Thanks

 

[boblarson]

Thanks for the reply,
I do understand creating the no of coloums is not a better idea, but the attendance needs to be captured on a daily basis, if i provide the dates in the row then it will not only increase the no of items,
also create a double work for me to go on a daily basis and update the employee details for current date.

The number of items (rows) is not as important as avoiding repeating fields. It is much harder to get meaningful data back out if you do it the way you are proposing. You can simply set up the form for entering the data to have the current date as a default so if you check a box for "HERE" then it will add the date for you.

If you put the data in the way you are proposing - how do you propose to report out, for example, the number of days of attendance? Or calculate the days missed? It would be almost impossible with repeating fields. So, unless you are planning on just doing this database up with the intent of putting data in and never pulling any information as to what data was input, then you need to not use repeating fields.