Question Auto populating fields

[Tyinawyn]

Hi there,

I have been working on a project for a few months now, limited access knowledge and learning as I go.

My database is designed to sit in different areas within our company. The database collates a number of different aspects from accidents to near misses within the area.

Part of the design is that the database is split within each area and a master database will link to the back ends of each database and pull in the information corporately.

Firstly does this vague description sound right?

The database itself is working good enough to collect the info I want, I still need to work on the sync button for master database so that it only pulls in any changes that have been made.
Will struggle with that one, but even before that I have an issue I cant solve and think it goes against the grain of normalisation.

As this info is being collected corporately, within each database I need the area and service name to be connected to every record in every table.

I could just have a drop down that has to be populated each time but that is cumbersome and not user friendly....
For example everyone working in the "blue" area lets say might be filling in hundreds of records in different tables over a month. As they fill in each form would they have to constantly pick blue on every record or could it not be picked, almost preset, some kind of initialisation so that the user does not have to even be concerned with that. but also when collected corporately all areas and services within that would be ready to report, graph etc.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Any help or advice would be so much appreciated

Thanks

 

[pbaldy]

Are the areas all on the same network? If so, I'd consider a common backend to avoid the syncing issue.

To your question, if you're distributing separate front ends, you could set blue as the default for the blue area's copy. You could also store the default value in a local table in the front end or something.

Alternatively, depending on how you sync, perhaps you could add the blue value as you import from that back end.

 

[Tyinawyn]

Hey,
Thanks for the reply.

They will be on the same server but each database will have a lot of additional content held locally that cannot be shared with other areas.
It will only be a query of select data that will be combined globally in the master database.

Do you mean as the default value in for that field in each table? doable but I will have 10 or so and a number of tables.... is there any way to set this when the database is first used by one of our teams so,
A pop window or something "choose area" select it and then it auto populates?

Thanks