Many to Many v. Multi-Select

[Shrout1]

A bit green, so bear with me.

I am designing a database to track different aspects of contracts. Primarily, I am tracking that contracts have a single prime contractor and many subcontractors.

One sub contractor could be involved in many contracts, and many contracts could involve multiple subcontractors.

I understand the basics of a juncture table and linking the primary keys together... My question is this...

Can I simply place a field in my contracts table that is a multi-select lookup to the subcontractor list or do I need to do all my linking on the form and perhaps create a subform to list all the available subcontractors? If I create a multi-select lookup how does that integrate into a form and how do I use that to filter results in a report?

Just looking for general advice

 

[Pat Hartman]

You need a subform but the subform shows the linked subcontractors not all the available ones. A combobox on the subform record lets you choose which subcontractor to assign. So as you add another subcontractor, you add another row in the subform.