Having a Problem With Relational Integrity

[Alex.Wood101]

Hey guys, I'm doing a college assessment right now and I'm having a few problems inputting data for a foreign key.

So, I'm basically making a database for hardware problems. One of the tables is called Hardware Problems Log. In this table an employee at this company would be able to write a report stating problems with a hardware at a certain time and place.

Each Employee has a ID in another table called Employee, the ID is an Auto Number. I've made a column in the Hardware Problems log called Employee ID (it's the Number data type), I've put the both of them in a one-to-many relationship.

Anyway here's the problem: Whenever I try to input a Employee ID, that is from the Employee table, into the Hardware problems log I get an error message, that says: "You cannot add or change a record because a related record is required in Table 'Employee Details'.

I understand that, but I do have a record in the other table. I'm really confused by this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[jdraw]

Have you studied/researched Normalization?
Do you understand Primary Key and Foreign Key?

A common analogy for the issue you are encountering is:

I want to add a Child to this family. However, there are no Parents defined.
You must have a Parent before you have a Child (record).

 

[JHB]

When do you get the error message, when you start to type in the ID, or when you move to another control or record?

 

[Alex.Wood101]

Hi thank you for replying, both of you.

The error was popping up after I finished the column and I had research normalization and understood it, but thank you for the help, jdraw.

I have figured out the problem, it was a silly mistake by me, as I'm new to access. My IDs for employee begin with 2 and have five numbers, increasing by increments of 1. When typing in these IDs, apparently I do not need to type out the full ID, just the number it increases by.

I didn't realize this at all until I selected an ID field and see that the number 2 at the beginning was not shown.

I hope this problem I had might be useful to any other access novice, like myself, in the future.