Lost a relationship and can't get it back (1 Viewer)

[joyce-helen]

I've got a relational database with five tables, one each for offenders, incidents, law enforcement response, and court outome. Plus I have a table with two primary keys - offender and incident, to help me link everything together.

I want to relate all these tables in a "circle", so that when I display the offender table, it links to their incidents, which links to the law enforcement, which links to the court outcome, which in turn links back to the original Offender table. But I've tried everything and I cannot get the court outcome table to link back to the offender table. Strangely, it worked fine in the beginning when I first designed the database, but now this relationship is lost and I can't get it back in. I don't know what happened to it. The court outcome table is now a dead end, which is unacceptable because we need to open this table by itself and view the offender data at the same time. Inexplicably, the relationship back to the offender table is shown in the Relationships view, but it is not active in the tables themselves! I've tried deleting it and re-inserting it but that doesn't work. Is this some sort of Access glitch? Please help! (Understanding how these relationships work is my weakest point in Access, I'm afraid.


Thank you in advance!

 

[neileg]

I'm not sure I understand the problem. When you run a query using the outcome and offender tables, you can create the link in the query. Will this not do? I'm not clear why a fully circular relationship is needed

 

[joyce-helen]

Thanks. I guess the circular relationship is not the main thing; I just need to be able to display the related tables in the regular table view, without doing a query, which is a way to workaround the glitch, yes, but that's a pain. I would prefer it to work the way it's supposed to, especially since some people viewing the database won't know anything about running queries. I can relate the other tables to each other in the normal way. Why not this one?