Church Database Help Needed!

G

Guest

Hi, I am setting up a church database that will keep contact details of
parishoners, show what ministry teams they are in and, hopefully, will allow
me to track attendance.

I am new to Access! Should I simply enter the dates of the Sundays of the
year into the main table after the contact detials and set it up as a
"YES/NO" thing and then get a form going to input the data or should I set up
the attendance as a separate, but related table? If on a separate table, how
do I get the names to appear without retyping them the new table?

thanks

Andy
 
D

Duane Hookom

I would have at least these tables:

tblParishoners
==================
parParID autonumber primary key
parFirstName
parLastName
.....

tblEvents (one record for each service or other activity)
====================
evnEvnID autonumber primary key
evnDate
evnTime
evnTitle (Sunday service, building committee mtg,...)

tblAttendance (junction table)
===================
attAttID autonumber primary key
attParID link to tblParishoners.parParID
attEvnID link to tblEvents.evnEvnID

You can then use a subform on the tblEvents main form for entering
attendance at the event. The subform would be based on tblAttendance and
contain a combo box with a Row Source of tblParishoners.
 
G

Guest

thanks I will give it a go. sorry for the the double post, after the first
one I got a message saying it hadnt been posted.

Andy
 
D

Duane Hookom

No problem with the double post. The purpose of my reply was more to direct
other possible replies to the single thread.
 
G

Guest

Hi again,

welll what you suggested works sort of! I got the form and subform working.
the form gives the date and activity, the subform gives me space to slect
the parishoners who came along. Names appear wonderfully, but I get an error
message telling me the field cannot be updated.

A possibly related issue is that on the attendance table I have linked to
the tblparishoners and used, in design view, a lookup to tell Access to go
and look up the names of the parishoners (rather than the id number which has
the primary key). However, Access only seems to allow the look up to return
a number, so I get the number of the record rather than the name.

Any ideas how I can correct these?

Andy
 
J

John Vinson

Any ideas how I can correct these?

Get rid of your Lookup field. The problem you're having is directly
due to this misfeature! see

http://www.mvps.org/access/lookupfields.htm

for a critique.

The table actually CONTAINS a number. That basic fact is concealed
from your view by the combo box created by the lookup wizard.

Use your combo box on the form, but its Bound Column should be the
numeric ParishionerID, not the name of the parishoner; that column can
be set with zero width in the combo's ColumnWidths property.

John W. Vinson[MVP]
 
D

Duane Hookom

Thanks for taking the time John. I gnu you would help out with a church
related database that was straying toward those sinful lookup fields ;-)

--
Duane Hookom
MS Access MVP
 

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