record of dates

[Guest]

i am a lawyer and in india. here the saying goes that courts are a place
where you get dates, not justice.!!! thats where my problem starts. i have
prepared a database of my cases, with fixed fields as names, section etc. But
in a life time of a case, i get many dates, all other factors remaining
constant. i wish to have history of at least last 4 or 5 dates in successive
columns. i wish to add date in first column, and the previous date should
AUTOMATICALLY shift to next column, likewise for four columns. is it too
much to ask for??????????

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Having multiple dates in the same row doesn't sound like a properly
normalized database, and your wanting to change which field a particular
value is stored in definitely isn't an appropriate use of relational
databases.

What you should have is two tables: one that contains the information that's
common, regardless of the date, and a second one that links to the first
table and has 1 row for each date. The normal way of handling this from a
Form perspective is to have a subform that displays the information fro the
second table.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Consider joining Access-L. I know that there's a lawyer from Canada who has
been working on a database for a few years. He may be able to help.

http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/access-l.html

 

[Stephen Glynn]

There's a complete legal case management application, VirtuaLaw, written
in Access and available as a free download at

http://dunsinane.net/bryan/

which you might want to take a look at.

Steve

 

[Allan Murphy]

If you need to store the dates you could run an update query that will do
the following

update date5 to date 4, date 4 to date3, date3 to date2, date2 to date1