Forms and Tales

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a form that I use to enter student information. How can I instruct
the form to copy the information from the previous entry to the new entry if
the student is the same student?

Example.
In the form I have Jason Smith with all his info.
I added Jason Smith again because he wants to enroll into another class. But
this time I only want his info copied from the previous entry, to avoid
entering it again. Thank you in advance.

 

[Douglas J Steele]

In a relational database such as Access, you should never have to copy
information from a previous entry. All of the information about the student
should be contained in a Student table, with something like a StudentId as
the primary key. Any other table should only have the StudentId in it: using
it, you can retrieve the student information in your query. For example, you
should have a Course table that contains all of the information about the
course, along with a CourseId as the primary key. Your registration table
should consist of strictly the StudentId and the CourseId (if the students
only take the course once), or those two fields with some date information
if they can take it multiple times. (There are, of course, other ways to
model this relationship to include the time element, and, in fact, the one
I'm suggesting above probably isn't the best)