[AccessD] This seems to get me often

I don't answer to Arthur, but yes he did.  I've done it before myself.
Have a table of contacts that contains a FK to a company table.  the
donation table would have a foreign key for donor which could be either
company or contact and another field in donors to tell you which kind of
donation it is.

Charlotte

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 4:13 PM, John R Bartow <jbartow at winhaven.net> wrote:

> Tina,
> IIRC it was Arthur F. who posted a unique solution to this issue many years
> ago. It had something to with one table holding both people and
> organizations and having a FK to a lookup that defined which they were.
> There was also a M2M table that allowed individuals in the main table to be
> linked to organizations in the same table and vice versa.
>
> I forget all the details but I thought it was brilliant solution to a
> common
> problem. The issues it would have solved for me were numerous.
> Unfortunately
> the app I was thinking it would help with was too involved to change the BE
> structure that much anymore. (I had gone down the Org PK < FK > ClientOrg <
> FK > Client PK structure route.)
>
> ARTHUR! Help me out here :-)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Tina Norris
> Fields
> Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 5:05 PM
> To: DatabaseAdvisors-Access
> Subject: [AccessD] This seems to get me often
>
> Hi,
>
> I do keep having this sort of problem to solve.  An example would be that a
> donor could be an individual or an organization.  So, a donation record
> might have an individual ID as an FK or it might have an organization ID as
> an FK.  I'm uncomfortable with setting up a table where one of two FKs will
> be blank.  Another example would be that a client of a law firm could be an
> individual or an organization.  Another example would be that a telephone
> could be associated with an individual, or a household, or an organization.
> What is the logical way to handle these?  What am I not seeing?
>
> Thanks for your guidance.
>
> TNF
>
> --
> Tina Norris Fields
> tinanfields-at-torchlake-dot-com
> 231-322-2787
>
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