Relations

[Guest]

I need some help with setting this up correctly.

I have an event, and at that event, one or more presentations will be given.
Each presentation will be given by a person with associated [address]
information.

How many tables does this set up require? I was thinking about 3 - a main
events table, a speaker information table, and a table to track the
presentations per event [presentation information comprises of speaker
information and a yes/no field].
What needs to go in the presentations table? And how are these tables to be
linked?

Thanks a lot for any assistance you may be able to render.

 

[John Vinson]

Will this work?

I have created a table Presentations with an autonumber ID field as the PK
and a Presenter Name field. The Presenters table contains an autonumber ID
field as a PK, a Presenter Name field, and some other fields. I added the
autonumber fields because I didn't want to run into any problems with using
the name fields for that purpose.
The main table is linked via it's autonumber ID-PK to the Presenter Name
field of the Presentations table in a one-to-many relationship, and the
Presentations and Presenter tables are linked in a one-to-one relationship
via their PKs.

Again, the plan is to be able to have several presentations associated with
one event, and to make sure that every presentation has its own corresponding
speaker information.

You're making a couple of mistakes here!

The Presentations table should NOT have the presenter name in it. Only
the table of Presenters should. And you cannot - CANNOT!! - link from
one Autonumber to another Autonumber. Not only are one to one
relationships quite rare (and inappropriate in this case), but you
can't control the value of the autonumber in the second table. It has
NOTHING to do with the autonumber value in the first table.

Instead, consider the following table structure to handle the many to
many relationship between presenters and presentations:

Events
EventID <Autonumber Primary Key>
EventDate
EventTitle
(other descriptive information about the event as a whole, NOTHING
about who is presenting)

Presenters
PresenterID <Autonumber Primary Key>
LastName
FirstName
<other bio information as appropriate>

Presentations
EventID <Long Integer, link to Events.EventID>
PresenterID <Long Integer, link to Presenters.PresenterID>
Title <of the presentation, if appropriate>
StartTime <Date/Time, if appropriate>
<other information about *this* presenter's presentation at *this*
event>

Note that the presenter's name does NOT occur in the presentations
table - only her ID. You can use a Query linking the two tables to
pick up the name, or a Combo Box on a Form storing the PresenterID but
displaying the name.

John W. Vinson[MVP]