Fields determined by data

[George Hewitt]

Hi i am fairly new to access and was thinking if it is possible to do the following.

Example:-
I have multiple channels of advertising techniques i.e. Email, Magazine, Newspaper. Is it possible to have different fields to be made avaliable based on the type of advertising channel that is select in a drop down box.

- User selects email in a form from a drop down box and fields related to that appear i.e. how many emails are sent, how many times.

Thank you for any assistance i'm just trying to get my head around the best way to achieve this

Note: Currently just using microsoft access 2013

George

 

[pr2-eugin]

Hello George,

Before getting into the design of the Forms for data entry, I would advice you to work on your Table design. I am not sure if you are aware of the Normalization issues. If not, start from there. Understand the relationships between tables. Draw a rough sketch of what are the required tables, how they need to be connected to get you the results you want.

Look up on some of the data models available, so you can get a head start.. http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/

Research on Normalization, refer to THIS document..

Once this is done, the Form design and usage would be a breeze.. Good Luck with your project !

 

[George Hewitt]

Thanks for the information you have supplied ill have a look now

 

[jdraw]

I agree with Paul that table design is critical and should be done first and vetted against your business requirements.

Where you have multiple "channels", and each channel has some unique attributes, you may wish to review supertype/subtype approach or Generalization. That would allow you to have a supertype "Channel" table that has subtypes "Email" , "Magazines"etc. Those attributes which are common are held in the Channel table. The attributes specific to a subtype are stored with that subtype table.

There is a brief writeup here
http://www.learndatamodeling.com/dm_...p#.Un7bKyewWvM

There is a tutorial (slides) here
http://sd271.k12.id.us/lchs/faculty/...dd_s04_l01.pdf

There is a more in depth youtube video by NancyIT2009 at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPAMJ9MzdY

To get a good handle on table design generally work through this tutorial
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/Tutorials/Entity_Relationship.zip

Good luck.

 

[George Hewitt]

Where you have multiple "channels", and each channel has some unique attributes, you may wish to review supertype/subtype approach or Generalization. That would allow you to have a supertype "Channel" table that has subtypes "Email" , "Magazines"etc. Those attributes which are common are held in the Channel table. The attributes specific to a subtype are stored with that subtype table.

Yes i will look into these areas. Looks good. Cheers

edit: the youtube video is pretty much perfect to what i needed to know

 

[jdraw]

Glad you liked it. Good luck with your project.