Question re-use records from Access database

[associates]

Hi,

I am creating a database for recording meeting minutes using Access 2003. It has functionality such as adding, editing and deleting minutes records.

The challenge I am facing here is say that we have added a new meeting minute no. 1 to the database for project 'A'. The challenge is whether or not this is feasible in database that rather than adding the next minute for the same project to the database from scratch, I can re-use the same minute from the previous minute and make some amendments and save it as minute no. 2. This way, it saves a lot of time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In theory this is possible but in my opinion adds needless code. Just allocate new record-slots for your meeting minutes as you need them. When you delete a meeting and its associated minutes entries, do a Compact and Repair on the result. That will make the DB as clean as possible and will also reclaim space, if your goal was to reclaim anything for space efficiency.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

obviously, you can do it either way.

its a matter of the data structure - presunably you need a minute ORDER - so you should have (at least) two table.

a) meeting
b) minutes

now the minutes table would link to the meeting table - and the minute table needs to contain some sort of ordering sequence data.

so now it should be easy either to edit exsiting minutes, or insert minutes at a particular point. However the insertion needs some lateral thinking.

lets say you have minutes 1,2,3

now to insert a minute between minutes 2 and 3, you either need to renumber all the minutes, or insert a new minute 2.5 - so the data type you use to manage the minute sequence will be importamt.