Attendance Rolls

[opee]

Attendance rolls are not showing all the members that belong to any given class, there are always missing people even when there records exist.
Your advise to generate attendance rolls that show all members in any given class will be greatly appreciated.
Joel Juarez.

A ward clerk pointed out this problem to me Sunday and I did some trouble shooting with him. Here is what I observed and found to resolve it:

PROBLEM :
When Sunday School and Primary attenance rolls were printed, there were individuals missing in the classes.

(Clarification for the skeptics: These members should have been listed in the classes because their age and birthdays corresponded to those classes. They showed up on YM/YW lists, but not in the Sunday School classes lists. The primary kids were just missing from the class lists. There was not pattern of who was missing: some were new members, some were long time members of the ward, some in the same family were listed, others in that same family were missing.)

DIAGNOSIS :
(1) I went to the class lists under "Organizations" and tried to "Add member". I was able to add the members that were missing in the classes, but when I went to print or even print preview, the names that I had added disappeared, and the class list reset to the previous list with the missing members not showing up.

(2) I went to the membership record of the members who were missing in the classes and saw that (a) on some members, the class was missing, and (b) on other members the class was present. When I chose the "Reset Organizations" for scenario (a), MLS processed the reset, but their Sunday School class did not show up. When I chose "Reset Organizations" for scenario (b), the Sunday School class they were in disappeared from the list of assigned organizations!

SOLUTION/WORK AROUND :
I found that if I went to the membership record and Clicked on the Sunday School class, or Primary class for the individual, MLS regenerated the class list correctly (automatically) and all of the appropriate members were listed (and saved) on the list. I could then go and print the Attendance Roll.

I had to choose one member of every class in Sunday School to have the classes regenerate. I only had to choose one member in the Primary, and ALL of the Primary classes correctly regenerated.

"OTHER BUG" :
To double check, I went back to the list of classes under "Organzations" and chose "Add Member" to see if there were any class members missing. (I was expecting to see members who were not assigned to a class.) Unfortunately, the list in the popup window showed the members that were originally "missing" from the attendance rolls--even though they were showing up in the "new" regenerated class lists.

I closed out of the window, tried to do a Print again to see if the class would revert to the "old, incorrect" class list, but it did not. So, I decided to leave it alone and told the clerk to print out the regenerated lists and give them to the Auxiliary groups.

Hopefully someone else who is having similiar issues can try the same solution on your MLS and see if it works for them the way that it worked for this unit.

[jbh001]

There used to be a bug where if you had more than one tab open, updates made in another tab would not appear until most (or all) of the tabs were closed and then re-opened.

For example, in one tab I may be looking at the members of a particular Sunday School class, and in another tab I may be looking the individual record of someone that should belong to that Sunday School class but for whatever reason is not showing up as a member of that class. If I add that member to the class in one tab (either manually, via Reset Classes, or via Rest Organizations), the change would not show up in the other tab until most (or all) of the open tabs were closed out and then re-opened.

Apparently the information in the tabs was static and would not refresh until the tab was closed and then re-opened. Sometimes all of the tabs needed to be closed before re-opening them would refresh the data.

For example, If I have a tab open for an individual record, another tab open to the Sunday School organization, and yet another tab open to Print Attendance Rolls/Lists, changes made in one place might not show up for the other tabs until I close all three tabs first before trying to re-open any of them.

I thought this had been addressed by some previous MLS update, but perhaps it is still lingering.

[mkmurray]

There used to be a bug where if you had more than one tab open, updates made in another tab would not appear until most (or all) of the tabs were closed and then re-opened.

For example, in one tab I may be looking at the members of a particular Sunday School class, and in another tab I may be looking the individual record of someone that should belong to that Sunday School class but for whatever reason is not showing up as a member of that class. If I add that member to the class in one tab (either manually, via Reset Classes, or via Rest Organizations), the change would not show up in the other tab until most (or all) of the open tabs were closed out and then re-opened.

Apparently the information in the tabs was static and would not refresh until the tab was closed and then re-opened. Sometimes all of the tabs needed to be closed before re-opening them would refresh the data.

For example, If I have a tab open for an individual record, another tab open to the Sunday School organization, and yet another tab open to Print Attendance Rolls/Lists, changes made in one place might not show up for the other tabs until I close all three tabs first before trying to re-open any of them.

I thought this had been addressed by some previous MLS update, but perhaps it is still lingering.

I think this issue you speak of is a fundamental issue in the design of MLS. I'm not going to pretend to the intimate internals of MLS, but I don't believe it is architected to handle modifying the data in one view while having another view of the same data open. It would be nice though if MLS was designed this way to be better data-bound so that the view of the data could at any point get updated because of changes on another view. These are just my thoughts from my own personal observations of having more than one tab open at a time.

[cboling]

Our ward has had about the same problem every year since adopting MLS. Each year we blow the classes away and recreate them. The rules always work, pulling the correct children into each class. Life is good until Jan 1st. At that point, 80% of the kids disappear from classes. Those remaining (who, curiously, have mostly Apr-Jun birthdays) are in the correct class for the new year.

A look at the member record for a missing child shows that they belong to no organizations. If you attempt to "reset organizations" for them, it does nothing.

The only solution I have ever been able to find is to delete the class, then turn around and create it with the exact same rules. Everyone will be pulled in for another year.

Weird, eh?

[russellhltn]

I've not heard that before. I can't find it, but I think there's an option to re-create the organizations based on the default rules. You may want to do that. It sounds like you're re-creating from old rules and there might be some flaw that's being perpetuated there.

[aebrown]

I've not heard that before. I can't find it, but I think there's an option to re-create the organizations based on the default rules. You may want to do that. It sounds like you're re-creating from old rules and there might be some flaw that's being perpetuated there.

You're thinking of the Reset Classes option. For each organization (Primary, Sunday School, etc.), you can go to that specific Organization, then at the bottom of the list of classes there will be a blue link for Reset Classes. Choosing that option will eliminate any custom classes you have created (CTR5A & CTR5B, for example) and reset the class rules to the default.

[jbh001]

Our ward has had about the same problem every year since adopting MLS. Each year we blow the classes away and recreate them. The rules always work, pulling the correct children into each class. Life is good until Jan 1st. At that point, 80% of the kids disappear from classes. Those remaining (who, curiously, have mostly Apr-Jun birthdays) are in the correct class for the new year.

A look at the member record for a missing child shows that they belong to no organizations. If you attempt to "reset organizations" for them, it does nothing.

I would suspect a corrupt installation of MLS, and possibly a corrupt database. I would remedy those by:

1. backing up the MLS database,
2. downloading the latest version of MLS and using it to perform a clean install of MLS,
3. restoring the database from the backup, and
4. then Request Unit Refresh Data for membership records followed by a Send/Receive Changes (followed by another Send/Receive Changes 2 to 24 hours after the initial refresh request was transmitted).

If you still have problems after that, you can either continue using your work-around, or try a call to Clerk Support to see if they have any additional ideas.

[jbh001]

I've not heard that before.

There are two kinds of resets, individual and global.

To reset an individual to the default organizations, from the MLS menu bar, navigate to Membership > Individual Record > select the desired record > then click the Reset Organizations For Member link.

To do a global reset of classes, from the MLS menu bar, navigate to Organizations > select either Sunday School or Primary (since these are the only ones a global reset applies to) > make sure you have selected the Primary (or Sunday School) tab on the left-most side of the window, and that the Show: dropdown box is set to All or Classes > use the right-most scroll bar to scroll to the bottom of the window > then click the Reset Classes link. This will delete all classes in the selected organization, including all custom classes, and recreate the default classes for that organization, including the default rules, and then automatically assign all members that meet those rules to those classes. At least that's what it is suppoed to do. YMMV.

[MorettiDP]

We have had another problem in our ward. A new called bishopric need an attendance roll for all the ward members for use during the sacramental meeting. It will be used to try for people not present at the meeting and after visit the house of these people. MLS don't show any option for an attendance roll for all members of the ward. Any of you have a solution for problems like this???

Thanks for your help!

[jdlessley]

We have had another problem in our ward. A new called bishopric need an attendance roll for all the ward members for use during the sacramental meeting. It will be used to try for people not present at the meeting and after visit the house of these people. MLS don't show any option for an attendance roll for all members of the ward. Any of you have a solution for problems like this???

You could print out a customized Directory of Members with only names before the meeting and then check off names of those present. This would require the person taking the attendance to know everyone by name and it will take significant more time than the regular attendance count.