On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:42:02 -0700, Jeff Yuen <Jeff
I was actually asked to make a database which keep track of volunteer hours
and claims. My biggest problem is that to make things convenient we would
like to input the data per activity, and how many hours each member have
receive and claims they require. However the data we need after processed is
report and record per member, showing their hours and claims. I read the site
that they say this is a type of many to many relationship. However I don't
where I should start with this.
Start with the table design. What Entities - real-life persons, things, or
events - does your application model? Well, let's see: there are Volunteers;
Activities; Hours; and Claims. Each of these should be a table (though I'm not
sure I understand what a "claim" might be!)
What does a record in each of these tables represent, and what information is
needed in it? Volunteers: VolunteerID; LastName; FirstName; other biographical
data; contact information such as phone number. Activities: ActivityID;
ActivityName; other info about the activity in the abstract. The core - the
many to many table - is probably Hours: it would have fields for VolunteerID
(who did the work), ActivityID (what they worked on), TimeWorked (probably a
Long Integer field storing minutes worked, to allow for 2 1/2 hours = 150
minutes). This would be related to the Volunteers table by VolunteerID and to
the Activities table by ActivityID, so that you could have a subform based on
hours on *either* a Volunteers form, or an Activities form, or both, depending
on whether you're focusing on an individual activity and want to see all the
volunteers, or vice versa.
I'm sure that the Claims can be handled in some similar way but since I don't
understand them...
John W. Vinson [MVP]