I currently have an MS Access application that stores information about the employees who have responsibility for a certain task.
My form goes like this. You enter the task in a textbox. You pick the employee from a combo box which is bound to the staff table. And finally we save this information to the Task table. As simple as that I thought...
But here is the problem. No employee works forever in a company. A new/another employee maybe assigned the task which was previously carried out by an employee who is no longer working there. In the form once I update the new employee the old employee information is replaced and we wouldn't even know that that employee existed.
I came across the concept of adding effective dates to the employee which may be used to track the history of employees.
Now I would like to know how I would be able to preserve the data of the previous employee when I update the Task form with the information of the new employee.
What should I do?
Thank you for your assistance.
BR,
Paul
I have uploaded links to three forms that I am working on.
In the outside company officer form we don't have the date fields mentioned.
In our companies proposal form we might need to add additional officers but don't want to repeat the proposal information just the officer, division, alternate officer & division.
In the outside company detail form we might need to apply the same concept to the director of the company without applying to other institute information.
I was also researching on this topic where I found a document which explains the concept of effective dates. I need to know how to apply this and also without making a lot of changes to the application.
www.gsa.gov/graphics/staffoffices/DatedInformationandDateTracking.pdf
I hope this helps you understand my problem.
It would seem you are keeping very simple information, you want to know who is currently assigned to any given task. Add a "assignedDate" field to your table. Then you can change any reports or forms where you need to display the current assignee to a query whereby you group by "task" and select only the latest record.
Do not include the assignee as a field in the task table. You would need an additional table, say "TaskAssignees" comprised of TaskID, ContactID, entry date, assigned date, unassigned date. Now in reporting you can pull the correct assignee given any date or list a history of the assignees from start to finish.
I would say that you are making the issue too complicated.
Surely there's an administrative policy on what happens to tasks when an employee leaves -- their replacement takes them over or they are assigned to the departing employee's supervisor or a co-worker.
Thus, your application should encode that business practice. The form where you edit the employees should be set up so that when an employee leaves, their tasks are moved to the appropriate employee. This means you don't have to store effective dates and then write the complex SQL to filter by those dates. Instead, you'll use the same structure as you already have.
Now, of course, I'm not stupid -- I know that many companies SHOULD have such policies, but very often, these things fall through the cracks. When I'm in this position (as an outside contractor) I tell them their two options and price the two options. Implementing a policy for what happens with the assigned tasks when the employee leaves is cheap. Implementing an effective date is EXPENSIVE. So, if they want to save money, they'll come up with a policy that can be implemented in the database application.
If the solutions already suggested don't work for you then you could look at creating an audit table which effectively logs every change that is made to a record (This would have the advantage of allowing you to track ALL changes, even in areas of your system you have not yet developed).
Here are a couple of links that show how you could go about doing this:
a simple solution for tracking changes to access data
Allen Browne - creating an audit log.
Related
I am attempting to recreate in MS Access a personal productivity database that I had in Notion (created based on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32dLXdB4ozs). Basically I have a bunch of things (Projects, Meetings, People, Partners (which are orgs), tasks, etc.) and relationships between then. Each project has partners. Each meeting covers certain projects. People work on particular projects and for particular partner organizations, etc. Lots of these relationships are many-to-many.
I've set up most of the back-end stuff: I have a table for each "thing". I also have tables for each many-to-many relationship. So for example I have a People by Partners table to show which people work for which partners, a Projects by People table to show which people work on which projects. A Meetings by Projects table for which meetings are about which project...etc. etc. i have made each field in this a linked relationship to the other two forms. So for example, the projects by people table has a project field linked to the project page and a people field linked to the people table. I've set all of these relationships to have data integrity and to do cascading updates.
Now I'm creating the more interface-like part, which will be used both for viewing and entering data. So I'm starting with a project form. In the project form, I'm putting a sub-form that will list the partners on that project. I created that form based on this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N46mgIqLXbA&t=0s) which you probably can't see, but the basic idea is that it's a combo box with the record pulled from the partner table and then the update linked to the partner by project table. I have set this to pick from a list since there are a limited number of partners.
Ok, now here's where I'm running into a problem:
I want to set this so that if I enter a partner name not already on the partner list, it gives me the option to add it as new. I've set it up using this code: http://msaccessgurus.com/VBA/Code/Combo_NotInList.htm . T
he code works fine (* sort of, see next para) if I do it directly to update one of the original tables (e.g. Partners), but I need it to update the Partners by Projects table.. I need it to put in the new Partner name, link it to the currently-viewed project, and then from there update the Partners table (which I thought would happen with the cascading updates).
Instead if I enter info not on the list, it asks me if I want to add it and then when I say yes, nothing happens. It doesn't add. In the form field, it shows me the dropdown list of existing partners to pick from. It tells me there's a syntax error and the error seems to be somewhere in the error proc.
How do I get this set up so I can enter the names of new partners and it will appear correctly as added wherever it should appear? Obviously the partners/projects is just one case where I will need to do this, so i need to figure this out or the whole system can't work!
Thank you for any help. Please note: I am not a professional (or even particularly skilled) programmer. My job is something else entirely and I am a muddling amateur with a basic understanding of programming and database concepts and some minor experience with other programming languages, but absolutely nothing with vb.
First off, I did read this post What is a good database design (schema) for a attendance database? but it doesn't fit my needs and I'm struggling to adapt it to my scenario.
I will try to explain in brief.
Let's take a school (sort of):
School has courses with a starting and an ending date
Students can be "subscribed" to multiple courses
A subscription doesn't necessary start from the beginning nor ending at the end of the course.
The student can be attended punctually (independently of the subscription) or transferred punctually in an another course.
I came with this design in mind:
My idea:
When transferring punctually a student, I can change the course_id
I can create an attendee without subscription_id, on demand
My problem:
With this design, It's seems over complicated and to see who's coming to a course, I see only two solutions.
Count the number of subscription, add the number of attendees present, remove the number of attendees absent.
Use a queue worker to create all the attendees and count the number of present attendee.
What would it be the easier way or what better schema could I use?
I'm creating a database that will be used to keep track of maintenance performed on equipment in a nursing home. I'm using MS Access 2010, and I'd say my skills are somewhere between novice and intermediate, almost entirely self-taught for this project.
The database structure is as follows:
tblAssetTypes:
TypeID (PK),
MaintenanceSchedule,
EquipmentType,
EquipmentSubgroup,
MaintenanceTime,
TasksRequired
tblUniqueAssets:
UniqueID (PK),
StorageLocation,
TypeID (FK)
tblPrevMaintRecord:
ID (PK),
UniqueID (FK),
DatePerformed,
TimePerformed,
MaintenanceComments
I currently have a form that can be used to record when preventative maintenance is performed on an individual asset. The user enters the UniqueID for that asset, and details about the maintenance (date, time, comments), and then this information is saved to tblPrevMaintRecord. That works fine, but when I presented it to my supervisor he pointed out that in many instances, maintenance people would gather all equipment of a certain type and complete the preventative maintenance in one batch. Needing to enter that data in multiple times would be very tedious and so he asked if it would be possible to record the maintenance performed on multiple items at once. I've spent all day trying to research how to do this but can't seem to find anything that explains how this would be possible.
For each kind of asset, there is one TypeID. However, some values for EquipmentType, such as "Trolley" have subgroups recorded in EquipmentSubgroup (in the example of trolleys, "Medication", "Laundry", "Dressing", "Food", etc.). If there is no subgroup for an EquipmentType, such as "Bed", the EquipmentSubgroup is recorded as a dash "-".
I think ideally, the user should be able to selected any EquipmentType or EquipmentSubgroup category, be shown a list of assets in those categories and the corresponding UniqueIDs, and then select the UniqueIDs that they wish to act on. Then they complete the details of the maintenance (date, time, comments) and records are added for each UniqueID reflecting the maintenance performed on each item. I worry this might be too complicated, and I'm open to compromise solutions.
This is my first time posting here after being a long-term reader, so I hope I've given all the information and detail required for people to be able to help! This database has not been rolled out yet either, so if anyone has other suggestions that they think might be helpful I'm happy to hear them!
I am planning on creating a database to track user's time in/time out M-F. Every week should begin on monday and run through sunday.
I have a table filled with my entire user population, so I know which users I need to create entries for and where they belong to. I have proposed so far, a table consisting of the following fields to track the entries (along with example data to fill the fields):
Field Name in table (Example of possible data)
---------------------
Employee (John Smith) 'String
Unit (Quality Assurance) 'String
WeekOf (9/9/13) 'date
InMonday (6:30) 'string, validate either a time in/out or N/A if holiday/vacation
OutMonday (3:15) '^^
HoursWorkedMonday (8.00) 'total hours worked
VacationMonday (0.00) 'if N/A for time, should have hours here
OvertimeMonday (0.00) 'any additional work hours should go here
For this instance, I would have to create In/Out for each day of the week (and perhaps track the date that each day is for). Is this extraneous or is there a seemingly better organization to tracking weekly time measurements? Should I use one table with a unit indicator or multiple tables for each unit?
Usually it's one table with a Date field, an In field and an Out field. That's pretty much standard timesheet data. Take a look at how this guy has it set up.
Make sure you're using an Employee ID in the timesheet, and then you would have a corresponding Employee table with all relevant info (ID, Name, Address, whatever else you store on him/her).
While this project is technically feasible, I have to question the value of making it yourself in Access.
The main issue is with security:
As a desktop program, this can be very easy to hack without precautions. Keep in mind that with Access, the user interface and the designer interface are by default the same thing.
If this is going to be a simple, straightforward db, a motivated user just needs to open the navigation panel and they can add/edit/delete all the timesheets.
If you hide the navigation panel, the user can just do a quick google search and learn to hit F11 (or find it by accident, either way)
You can try regularly (daily? hourly?) transferring the data from the publicly accessible back-end to an archive db that is not accessible to the general users. This can work, but still gives them a window to edit records. And if you don't do the transfer right, they can still add old records.
As a webform on a SharePoint, this can be fairly secure. I'd recommend this if you have Sharepoint.
You should also consider your development time. This is a very common business task across many industries, from restaurants to factories to schools. As such, there's a huge number of cheap web-based options already out there that you can start using today. I'll even assume some of these include summary reviews breaking out numbers by departments as well.
I've never researched these myself, but a quick google search found this interesting page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_time_tracking_software
I've been using Access to create simple databases for a while with great success, but have run into a problem I can't find an answer to.
We ship individualized serialized units to various end-users, and occasionally to resellers that stock them for end-users. I must keep track of which serial numbers end up with each end-users.
The first database I created to handle this recorded company information in one table using their account number as primary key, order information in a second table using the order number as the primary key and linked via the company name, and unit information in a third table with the serial number as the primary key and linked via the order number.
This worked very well until I had to account for these stock orders with a reseller. As it was structured, every unit was linked to one company via the sales order. The issue is that I may ship 20 units on one order to Company A, who then sells 5 to Company B and 3 to Company C.
I realized I needed to link the company name directly to the units, not the orders and have fixed that.
My issue now is simplicity in entering information in the form. My previous database involved the employee in our shipping department merely entering the sales order, selecting the customer name from a drop down menu, then scanning the serial numbers in a subform. This was to ensure simplicity and try to eliminate human error. He had only three things to input, and most of the input was done by scanning barcodes.
As it is currently structured now, the employees out in shipping would have to populate the company name for every record in the subform with the serial number and that complicates things in a way that is unacceptable. At the point of shipping, the company name will always be the same for every unit in the subform.
So.
How would I go about creating a form where the company name is entered once in the form, and automatically populates itself for every record in the subform? The caveat here is that I must also be able to go back occasionally and change the company name of individual units in an order without necessarily affecting the rest of the order. I suppose it starts out as a one-to-many relationship that then must be able to change.
I hope that makes sense.
I have looked for answers using various approaches with auto-fill and relationships and not preserving data integrity, but I feel the answer is just beyond my reach.
The only solution I can think of is to create another field in the unit table for the end-user, and perhaps write a formula that sets this default value as the company name from the order that shipped it. This seems unnecessarily complicated and redundant, there has to be a better way.