probably basic acess question

[Mike3411]

Hello, I'm trying to set up an access db system to manage a small library at my school. The librarian needs an easy way to check out books, check in books, add/remove books, as well as see which are overdue, which need to be returned, etc. Furthermore, they need records to be kept so they can see which books get taken out, which are taken out by which departments, etc. The way I plan on doing this is to make a table with all the books, and a table with a transaction log. I would like the librarian to be able to select the book from a combo box ( w/ autocomplete), type in the name of the person checking it out, and click a confirm button. This should flip a boolean in the booklist table (saying that it's currently checked out) and add an entry to the transaction log with the pertinent information. I am, however, a bit lost with what forms, queries, reports, macros, etc. all do. I'm tried making a form to do this, but it won't let me pull data from the other tables, or at least I can't get it to work. I want to have the librarian select the name of the book, then have the bookID placed into the transaction history. I have a few other challenges, but any help figuring out how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Have a go with the combo box wizard first this will give you an idea of how to pull data from other databases .

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Uncle Gizmo is right, but I'll take it a step further.

In order to do this right, you need tables to hold things like books, authorized patrons, departments, transactions, etc. If you do, and if you set up proper relationships, then you can use the combo-box wizard. With the tables and relationships defined, it will automatically build the right data relationship in the combo box to pull data from your supporting (lookup) tables. It all happens automagically.

If you don't have a complete list of books in the library, your books table will be sparse (fractionally populated) with respect to the entire library, so you will need to consider how to add books "on the fly" when you have a book not in the list of "known" books. Ditto for students. Ditto for deparments. When THAT happens, you are looking at lots of extra VBA code to enter the new record(s) in the appropriate table(s).

In order to even get started with the latter subject, you need to know something about "NotInList" events, which would be a possible result from storing something in the combo box that was not in the original list.

This post is more intended as "food for thought" than a detailed description of each step. You might wish to search the forum for "NotInList" events as a general topic. You should catch quite a few good hits on it.

 

[Mike3411]

Hello,
Thanks for the help, it turns out I was able to do what I wanted by setting the up the relationship (I had i search on that alot, i wasn't sure what it did) and then futzing around with the form wizard. I didn't use any NotInList events, since basically all the things had to be typed in manually. Anyway, I'm totally sure I understand access that well, but I did get it to work and i wanted to thank you both for the help. Now I get to move on to the other problems I'm having =)
Thanks,
Mike