I'm rewriting my teacher grade book setting up the basic structure of the program. In this version, I want to include a way to keep attendance.

So far, I've set up separate VB classes for Student, Assignment, and Course. I'll probably add another on for Parent, and access that from within the Student class (to keep up with a Student's parental info.)

Right now, I'm thinking about how to set up the attendance "array" for each student. I will only want to keep up with certain attendance states -
T for tardy
A for absent
X for "gone on school trip" like a ball game or field trip etc.
L for "gone to resource lab" - for special needs students
Maybe a couple of others that I haven't though of yet.

I'll need to keep a list of these attendance events, for each student, for each 9 weeks - one grading period being 9 weeks. Since there are only 45 days (usually) in a grading period, I could set up an array from 0 to 50 for each quarter for each student. Some of the array items would just be left blank. With today's fast computers, I don't think that would be a problem. Do you?

I'm just a little unsure how to set this up.

In my main program, when th 4th student is absent on the 10th day of the 1st NineWeeks, I want to do something like

Student(4).Attendance(1,10).Date = TodaysDate
Student(4).Attendance(1,10).AttendanceState = "A"

I'd also like to be able to querry which students were absent on a specific date, how many absences and tardies a student has for the 9Weeks or semester, or full year, etc. There may be other querries that I haven't though of too.

So basically, I'm just looking for suggestions on how to best implement all of this.

Oh yeah, I'll be using text files to store the data, not a database.