table design - inheritance problem

[digi_kiwi]

HI
I'm stuck on what may be a very simple problem. I realise Access doesn't really support inheritance so i'm not quite sure how to design some product tables. The DB is for a kitset house company.

The product table contains, ProductID , name, image, description.
This is fine for most products but there are certain special ones that also require extra information. These are:

Kitchen: Type, colour, benchtop color, yes/no(is optional)
Cladding: Type, colour
Bathroom: yes/no (is also optional)

All other products are building related. This information is used for ordering from suppliers and printing invoices for a client.

If anyone could help or point me in the right direction, that would be great.

Thanks.

 

[Parker]

Kitchen: Type, colour, benchtop color, yes/no(is optional)
Cladding: Type, colour
Bathroom: yes/no (is also optional)

Use a table to list type and a seperate table to list colour.

Join these together

Your choice of display on your order forms then has a number of options but I would use a pick list from cascading combo's

Your Y/N for the kitchen I would forget as it is not necessary the other just put a controll on your main form.

HTH

 

[Pat Hartman]

Identify all your common attributes and place them in the Product table. It is ok to have some attributes that only apply to some rows. But if you have too many, you should consider 1 or more new tables that will be related 1-1 with Product. This will minimize the total data storage so you won't have a lot of rows with empty columns.