Daily attendance

[ginga]

Is there a known way to setup CiviCRM to manage the daily attendance for a classroom?

[Donald Lobo]

I dont think CiviCRM has got a good data model for this. You can potentially track via activities but it seems like an overkill

I suspect a multiple record custom table with fields  contact reference / data / class id is what is needed. You manage the attendance sheet outside of civicrm similar to how i do things in the school module (http://civicrm.org/taxonomy/term/26). If you do build it, please share your code, since i'm looking for something similar to manage extended care attendance online

lobo

[houclub2]

(I see this thread is about five years old, and since the last post, lobo made a related blog post at https://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/handling-attendance-extended-care-activities-civicrm . I'm posting here so that there's one thread about daily attendance instead of two, though maybe this post belongs in the "Pre-installation questions" forum.)

We're considering using CiviCRM to handle data and maybe some communications. Most of the implementation I can figure out -- the biggest pending question is:

- Can CiviCRM (+ Drupal, or other if recommended) handle 7,000 daily attendance records per year, and provide elegant data reporting over multiple years (i.e. five years = 30,000 records)? Or, more precisely, what magnitude of server resources would be required for such data handling? (see below about server idea)

Other questions and considerations:

- We would probably include Social Security Numbers in our profiles, so security is a concern and HIPPA rules relevant (though not directly enforced for our organization). One solution we're considering is running a plug computer in one of our locations, only allowing access via local network (LAN), and maybe setting up a VPN so that users at our second location can act like they're on the LAN. Not sure if a plug computer would have enough resources to run CiviCRM well.

Any suggestions welcome and appreciated,
Patrick

[petednz]

Not suggesting this will work for you - or even that it will work in our use case in the long term. But we needed a solution that recorded attendance on a half day basis. We did this with an Activity with 10 fields with radio options to cover the variations of 'Present, Permitted Absence, Not attended and Not enrolled' for each half day. And another field for 'week commencing' to get the date of the week. We then report against that via Drupal Views.

We then run percentage reports on a monthly basis via an export.

[houclub2]

Thanks for the suggestion Pete. Our organization is not a school, so our tracking needs are a bit different (for the curious, we're a clubhouse, following the Clubhouse International model: http://www.iccd.org ).

Our attendance tracking database table right now has: AttendanceID, ContactID, Date, Time in, Time out. Rather than recording anything for an absence, we just know that if there's no record, the person didn't come that day.

For reporting, we'll want to get numbers like; How many people came at least once during the 90-day period ending on X date? and What was the average daily attendance per week over the past six months, along with the minimum and maximum for each week? It sounds like these reports would be easiest in Drupal Views or by exporting to a spreadsheet...?

As for server resources, an example cheap plug computer has 1.2GHz ARM processor, 512MB 16bit DDR2 RAM (800MHz), and 512MB NAND Flash (for operating system). Would that be enough to run CiviCRM? Or would it need more CPU, and/or more RAM?