Filemaker Attendance tracking

Here we create our first table and a first, very basic layout.

We'll tweak the student layout a little more and add a list view.

Let's add a menu so we can navigate to the different parts of our database.

Let's make the classes table and layout.

The teachers need to be related to the classes so we need to make that table first.

Some little tricks like going to a related layout and sending an email directly from whithin Filemaker.

Here we can list all the classes that a teacher is teaching.

So we can assign a student to a class and see the classes the student is taking.

We could also add students to a class.

We will need to get some contact information for the students parents. So let's give them their own table.

Let's find a way to add new parents to the Parents table from the Students table.

Filemaker Pro Advanced has a script debugger. If you have it you better learn how to use it.

Let's add some more checks to our script so we can prevent the creation of duplicate parents.

Even after finding a parent with the same name we might want to create a new one anyway.

Let's add some buttons that let us move back and forth between students and parents.

It's nice to be able to select one parent as the main contact.

We can organize our classes list by grouping the classes together by day.

We will take attendance in a separate table because of it's relationship to time.

We might only want to see classes that are actually happening today in our dropdown.

Let's get our students related to our attendance.

We might want to take attendance with an iPad and then buttons are always handier.

We don't want to do this manually, let's make a script.

There are still things that can go wrong. So let's prevent that from happening.

There are too many buttons. Let's see what options we have to get rid of them.

Let's add some totals for the different statuses so we can see how many kids we have in total and how many are present.

An overview of all the classes with the totals of the student statuses.

So we can get the Attendance details for a specific student.

Let's add a detailed overview list that shows a list of all students that are there on a certain date.

We should be flexible in the dates we are able to search for.

We can go even further into our found set to see only students of a certain status.

Let's try out some dynamic sorting.

Let's figure out a way to find all the students who are present right now.

Sometimes making a find on one layout affects the found set on another layout. Let's fix this.

We can create a ranking of students that are most often sick, late or absent.

What do we need to get started?

We can send a text to one number or to multiple numbers.

Let's create the script that allows us to send the text message through the SMS Api.

Let's make it so that it is clear which student's parents have already been texted.

We can show a graph on the menu so it looks like a dashboard with data from a related table.

Let's make our chart more dynamic by giving it the ability to show changing sets of data.

If I don't want to navigate through the records manually I can also make a list of graphs and simply scroll through them.

This is a handy feature that allows us to list the students according to their upcoming birthdays.

There is a difference between the current age and the age the person is going to have on their birthday.

Let's make it so that people who's birthdays have already passed show up on the list for next year.

To make sure we can't select the same student twice we will create a dwindling value list.

This is essentialy the same thing as the one before but because it's kind of tricky I will go through it again.

Let's first create the basics. This will be a certificate table.

Let's get the actual Certificate templates into Filemaker so we can fill in some variable data.

We will need to list our certificates so we can actually print them.

So we can keep track of which certificates have already been printed.

This gives us the ability to export all the Certificates that need to be printed into a Pdf.

Let's add the final finishing touches that finish our file.