About the 'no data entered' status

background when a student has no attendance recorded in a session, this can be due to one of two possibilities the student was not required to attend the session, such as when they are not allocated to the session or their class was not assigned to the session they were required to attend but no attendance was recorded for them this may be due to their staff not tracking and recording attendance version 3 1 0 of this software introduced the 'no data entered' status (also referred to as a 'no data' status) status as a way to track situations where students were required/expected to attend a session but they had no attendance status recorded in previous versions of this software, such historical 'blank' attendance was easy to overlook now with the 'no data entered' status being applied to all historical 'blank' attendance it's possible to know and report on this situation, and to have attendance rates affected by this status if desirable see below how the 'no data entered' status works a few hours after each session has finished, the 'no data' status is automatically applied to all students who were expected/required to attend the session, taking into account any class assignments and allocations by default this is 240 minutes (4 hours) and can be changed by editing the setting apply 'no data' delay minutes which is configured at admin > attendance > settings it could be changed to 5 minutes or half an hour or 8 hours depending on when it should be automatically applied when a student has a 'no data' status, this means that attendance has not been recorded for the student and the student was expected/required to attend the session this is different to there simply being no attendance recorded (blank attendance records) for the student in a session there should be a 'no data entered' attendance status enabled at all times it can be configured to be hidden from selection if it is not desirable for users to manually choose this status when recording attendance however it must exist so that it can be automatically applied to blank attendance records as sessions finish when the status is applied automatically, it will be applied to all students who were expected to attend the session to determine which students were expected, classes and allocations will be inspected if a student's or session's class assignments change before the 'no data' status is applied automatically, this will affect which students receive the 'no data' status for this reason it may be desirable to have the status applied soon after each session finished, because the longer the delay, the more likely class assignments could change however it may be desirable to allow the class assignments to change during this window timing of the 'no data entered' automated process the 'no data' process should run automatically every 5 minutes, and will apply to all blank attendance for sessions which have finished by more than the configured delay minutes, going back 2 days, and only for sessions which have not had the 'no data entered' process run yet implications for attendance calculations because the 'no data entered' status is a regular attendance status, you can control how attendance rates are affected when you configure the status, just like other attendance statuses there are two different ways you may wish to configure no data statuses 'no data entered' status being calculated as an absence this is desirable if you wish to make sure that when staff don't record attendance, that their courses and students show up with low (or zero) attendance rates, rather than being ignored and slipping under the radar 'no data entered' status being ignored other notes sessions with 'no time' selected are considered to be ‘all day’ and the 'no data delay' will apply 24 hours from the start of the session (the start is 12am on the day of the session) sessions can only be 'complete' after the 'no data delay' period has passed and only if there are no 'no data' statuses sequence based sessions do not have a date, so the 'no data' process does not apply; they will behave as if all sessions are in the future, except for calculating the status where the sessions are marked as complete only when all students in the course have an attendance record