We've used a variety of methods over the years to control which users can edit which enrollments and so forth, but bringing Michigan on over the past year presented some challenges because they already had a lot of processes that worked well for them but weren't in line with anything we'd ever done in MIS2000. One of these was the ability to lock enrollments for an entire school year from editing by anyone. I'm always a little amazed when something like this comes up because I don't think anyone across all these years in all these states has ever asked for that. And yet it seems like something lots of folks would want.

We took a couple different runs at it but finally decided on a very neat solution that integrated almost effortlessly into the architecture we already had for this, so the whole app picked it up for free. We wound up just adding a new field to their Funding Year table called Locked. Whenever they want, they can just go in and change it to Y for a year, and bang, every enrollment in that school year is locked for everyone. No more edits. And it can be turned off just as easily if the need should arise. It looks like this in the code table editor:

I think we've already implemented this for another state, but I'm not sure who, maybe Wisconsin. But it works great and it's pretty easy.