I am currently working on a project for myself and I'm creating a database for an Institute that helps students prepare for grade 12. I have thought about this topic for quite a while and did not have any efficient solution. However, I think if I added a field like "Entered by" in each table, it's datatype will be Lookup wizard. I will take the list from an admin table.
Look here for image
However this does not seem to be efficient since other users might be able to infiltrate the tables and change data. My apologies for my English and any lack of basic knowledge in access. I'm still a student.
Well, I found an answer, you just need to do it in a form. Have the login form opened and connect its value to where you need. For example, if you need the name of the user in the open login from, you just create an "Entered by" field and make its default value equal to forms!login!username.
Related
(Table Relationships)
I'm developing a travel agency database, and I've got a table for contacts (people), a table for trips, and a junction table, people_has_trips. "Trip" refers to a table whose identity is mostly many-to-many relationships with various optional travel elements such as hotel, flight, etc. (I have doubts about this structure, but that's an issue for another question).
Anyway, I'm in the early phases of designing the form for Trips, which will almost entirely consist of subforms linking to junction tables. The problem that's given me the most difficulty so far is that of how to add a contact to a trip. I'm fairly new to access, and thus far I've been populating such tables using autofilling comboboxes, but the contacts table contains over 100,000 records, and as such some sort of search function would be prudent.
Here's what I have so far. This subform is based on the people_has_trips table, and currently is limited to showing existing records. I disabled all fields as not to allow the editing of People records, but I'm somewhat stumped as to how to handle adding more people. In my limited Access knowledge, the most logical solution to me seemed to be having a button to open a form that would allow the searching of People and perhaps the addition of new people.
Now, I have a fully realized form for entering new People (shown below), but it doesn't have any real search functionality besides Access's built-in filters. So my subform currently opens People and... does nothing else. Quite frankly, I have no idea where to go from here. Do I develop a second form for searching people, or do I build in search functionality to the primary People form, something I should probably do anyway? If so, How? And after doing either of those things, how do I then populate people_has_trips? The only answer I can think of involves the user clicking the button to open People, finding the person they want to add, and then manually entering the primary key into the subform, which surely isn't optimal.
The aforementioned People entry form
The solution, I would wager, is VBA commands. I've recently taken the time to learn some VBA, and I'm a bit more comfortable with it, but I just don't know where to begin with this problem. I'm confident that I can adapt and apply other people's VBA ideas and code, but I can't find a thread on this particular issue from which to do that! I'm guessing the reason I can't find any help for this issue is that it's so blatantly obvious that nobody has asked the question yet, or my Google skills are lacking. Either way, I'd be quite happy to facepalm in realization of the solution. Thanks any and all for their help!
You need to be focused on your core problem and as far as I understood, you want to search and add "users/contacts" to your "People on this trip" form.
Yes combo-boxes can eat up time loading 100k rows and it's not really search friendly.
In your "People in this trip" form you can:
have a text box => for search
have a combo-box => showing search result
[Search] [Add] [Clear] buttons
In theory,
search button performs a search on your TContacts table and assigns the results to the combobox. something like SELECT PersonId, FirstName, LastName From Prople WHERE firstName like #keyword OR lastNAme like #keyword ... other fields
User selects a specific result form the combo-box.
Add button then performs SQL operation adding selected user to your junction table and refresh your junction table.
something like: INSERT INTO people_has_trips (people_personId, trips_tripId) values (#selectedPersonId, #tripId); followed by requery
This is just a theory, you need to try out something and narrow it down to a specific problem. Otherwise your question might be marked as too broad.
Unfortunately, I have to deal with a lot of user submitted data, text fields rather than option boxes. I have imported it into my MySQL database as strings. I do all this to be able to run statistics quickly on the data like top 10 most common companies. The problem I have run into is that some of the rows have slightly different names for the same companies. For example:
Brasfield & Gorrie, LLC VS Brasfield and Gorrie
Britt Peters and Associates VS Britt, Peters & Associates Inc.
Is there some fairly straightforward MySQL command or external tool that will allow me to go through and combine these sort of rows. I know how to use REPLACE(), but I don't think it has the power to do this simply. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Taking this example:
Brasfield & Gorrie, LLC VS Brasfield and Gorrie
Assuming that I want to keep the first one, I would find all records that have the ID of the second one and update them to use the first, assuming that this table that has these titles also has an ID field for each one.
You would create a page in PHP that will allow you to administer this with mouse clicks, but it will require regular pruning since you allow users to enter this data. For future entries, you can try to apply the Levenshtein Distance and try to provide a suggestion based on available similar matches so that you can help guide the users to something that already exists rather than a new db entry.
Within my database i have 3 different tables for different members. When saving the members details i use a form to save the members all to the same table but i would like to save them to a specific table depending on their details. for example if a member has registered with their school email i would like them to be saved within the student table, if they have used a freemail email address to be saved in the freemail table etc
Would this be run as a query or sorting the one table using if statements?
You probably should not have three tables, just a field that defines the member type. You may wish to read Fundamentals of Relational Database Design.
If you really insist on having three tables, even though it is likely to cause ever more tangled scenarios, you will either have to use VBA to gather the data from an unbound form and then fill it into the appropriate table, or ask the user which table they wish to update before you start and set up the form for that table.
It depends on your development environment. You can either change the switch to an If clause at business level or you can implement it as a database procedure. It's up to you.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa933214(v=sql.80).aspx explains how to use If clause in database
Users on my site are shown a list of items. The list they see is based on criteria they have completed in a form - they're receiving suggestions if you like.
Now, if a user doesn't want to receive a certain suggestion again, i want them to be able to stop it from showing up.
So, do i create an exceptions table which simply has a user id number and suggestion id number per row and search that before giving suggestions..meaning if the user has previously said no then skip to next suggestion.
Or, do i have a table with a row per user which has their user id and a field of all their exceptions, maybe comma separated or enclosed in[] and do a "where in" search to see if an exception is there - if the latter though and the user decides they do want a particular suggestion at a later date, its easier to get it out of a row per suggestion table as opposed to a field where they are, in fact i wouldn't know if thats even possible.
All advice welcome.
It sounds like a many-to-many relationship between users and preferences/exceptions. I'd rather do that than the IN idea.
I'd have a table of "available suggestions" with a suggestion reference and a user reference. so for each user there would be one record for each suggestion available to them. When a user user clicks no, then that record can be deleted from the available suggestions.
Hope this makes some kind of sense.
currently Im working on a project that, at first glance, will require many tables in a database. Most of the tables are fairly straightforward however I do have an issue. One of the tables will be a list of members for the website, things like username, password, contact info, bio, education, etc will be included. This is a simple design, however, there is also a need for each member to have their availability entered and store in the database as well. Availability is defined as a date and time range. Like available on 4/5/2011 from 1pm to 6pm EST, or NOT available every friday after 8pm EST. For a single user, this could be a table on its own, but for many users, Im not sure how to go about organizing the data in a manageable fashion. First thought would be to have code to create a table for each user, but that could mean alot of tables in the database in addition to the few I have for other site functions. Logically i could use the username appended to Avail_ or something for the table name ie: Avail_UserBob and then query that as needed. But im curious if anyone can think of a better option than having the potential of hundreds of tables in a single database.
edit
So general agreement would be to have a table for members, unique key being ID for instance. Then have a second table for availability (date, start time, end time, boolean for available or not, and id of member this applies to). Django might sound nice and work well, but i dont have the time to spend learning another framework while working on this project. The 2 table method seems plausable but Im worried about the extra coding required for features that will utilize the availability times to A) build a calender like page to add, edit, or remove entered values, and B) match availabilities with entries from another table that lists games. While I might have more coding, I can live with that as long as the database is sound, functional, and not so messy. Thanks for the input guys.
Not to sound like a troll, but you should take a look into using a web framework to build most of this for you. I'd suggest taking a look at Django. With it you can define the type of fields you wish to store (and how they relate) and Django builds all the SQL statements to make it so. You get a nice admin interface for free so staff can login and add/edit/etc.
You also don't have to worry about building the login/auth/change password, etc. forms. all that session stuff is taken care of by Django. You get to focus on what makes your project/app unique.
And it allow you to build your project really, really fast.
djangoproject.org
I don't have any other framework suggestions that meet your needs. I do... but I think Django will fit the bill.
Create a table to store users. Use its primary key as foreign key in other tables.
The databases are written to hold many many rows in a table. There are not optimized for table creation. So it is not a good idea to create a new table for each user. Instead give each user an unique identifier and put the availability in a separate table. Provide an additional flag to make an entry valid or invalid.
Create a table of users; then create a table of availabilities per user. Don't try to cram availabilities into the user table: that will guarantee giant grief for you later on; and you'll find you have to create an availabilities table then.
Google database normalization to get an idea why.
Take it as truth from one who has suffered such self-inflicted grief :-)