[AccessD] This seems to get me often

John R Bartow jbartow at winhaven.net
Wed Dec 24 00:45:09 CST 2014


Now, THAT made me laugh Charlotte!

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Charlotte Foust
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 6:24 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [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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