Overview
Attendance records are records that indicate an individual's or an asset’s inclusion in a particular Session, most typically a class session. These records are various record types of the Event object.
These are the items that can be associated with a session and the associated Event record types :
Students = Session Student
Staff = Session Staff
Locations = Session Location
Resources = Session Resource.
For example, in a session where there are 20 students, a teacher and a classroom, there will be 20 Session Student, 1 Session Staff and 1 Session Location Event records required.
Note that both Locations and Resources are types of Assets.
Running Attendance Generation
Attendance generation can be executed either through the Generate Attendance button on the Session window…
or, more commonly through the nightly Generate Attendance Batch process that typically generates attendance event records for all sessions for a specific period in advance.
See the Generate Attendance Batch component documentation for further details.
Process
Regardless of the method used, the process is the same for each Session for which attendance is to be generated.
In the previous example of 20 students, a staff member and a location, these details are retrieved by looking at the Cohort associated with the Session. (via the Cohort Session object).
The 20 students are identified by the fact that they have Cohort Member records of record type = Student linked to the Cohort. For each of these a Session Student event record is created and linked to the respective Cohort Member and Session.
For Staff, Location and Resources it depends on whether the timetable is managed internally or not for that particular cohort. If it is managed externally (e.g. via Daily), then the Publish Daily Data and Publish Daily Delta processes are responsible for associating each of the staff and location event records with the Session by creating the respective Session Staff and Session Location event records.
If the timetable is not managed externally, then the system looks at the Cohort Schedule record associated with the Session via the Cohort Session record and identifies any related Cohort Schedule Connection records. These records identify the Staff, Locations and Resources to be associated with the corresponding Sessions.
Once that has been done, event records of types Session Staff, Session Location and Session Resource will be created as a result.
Once a session’s attendance details have been created they can be maintained to meet a variety of requirements. For example, if a Session has a replacement teacher then the Edit Session window will cause a new Session Staff record to be created for the replacing teacher and it will update the corresponding Session Staff record for the teacher being replaced to reflect this.
So to, the Add Student button on the Mark Roll screen will create a Session Student record for that student in the particular Session and automatically mark them as present.
