Annotating the Relationships Diagram

[Chaim]

Is there perchance any way of annotating a relationship on the Relations
diagram?

I have a Personnel table related to a Roles table (because an instance of a
person can occupy one of several roles and the set of roles is moderately
volatile). Another Core table has several different instances of people
(primary, backup, POC). In the Relations diagram, this shows up as the Core
table with three instances of Personnel (P, P1, P2) and three instances of
the Roles table. Each of the Personnel tables are shown as being directly
related to the relevant field of the Core table. But the three instances of
the Role table are all shown as being related to the P instance of the
Personnel table (even though they were not drawn that way).

Alternatively, in this situation, should the diagram only show one instance
of the Roles table? Would it be generally understood that the same
relationship applies to each instance of Personnel?

Thanks.

 

[Douglas J Steele]

No, there's no way to add annotations.

I'm not 100% certain I understand your second question. Access will often
introduce "shadow copies" of tables to minimize line crossovers. I don't
believe you can change that behaviour.

 

[Chaim]

Thanks Doug. You understood the second question perfectly.

I realize that those other tables are 'shadows' but that is precisely where
my annotation issues arise. One can always walk the lines back to find out
which one of the relations a particular shadow table is supporting- a pain
but doable. But what seems to happen is that I'll get all of the shadow
tables relating to the primary instance of the parent shadow. In other
words, although I have three Personnel tables (one 'real' and two
'shadows'), each of the three Roles tables all show their relation to the
'real' Personnel table. There are no lines to walk. If I delete one of the
Personnel-Core relationships, Access doesn't remove the no longer needed
Role-Personnel relation automatically. I'd expect it to be able to determine
that there is now only one 'shadow' relationship and clean up accordingly.