Multiple dates for same client.

I am trying to build a database. I work in a law firm and many clients have more than one court date. I have the columns Court date, Court Time, Court room #. I think this will be best for soting. I want to be able to have a client with two sepeate dates but not repeat his name and other information again. Is there anyway to do this.

Thanks for any reply.

i think what you should do is
create two tables
first, consisting of client name and a unique identifier

second table consisting of court date time...etc plus the
record identifier

then build a relationship between the two tables...


-----Original Message-----
I am trying to build a database. I work in a law firm and
many clients have more than one court date. I have the
columns Court date, Court Time, Court room #. I think this
will be best for soting. I want to be able to have a
client with two sepeate dates but not repeat his name and
other information again. Is there anyway to do this.

Thanks for any reply.
.

Um Thanks but How do I do that? What would be an example of a unique identifier? How do I build a relationship between them? See I have never used Access before and am unfimlular with it's language.

you can use/create/insert a field on your first table
... you can use for example... autonumber field.
or a unique code for each client, depending on your need
it must be unique and no duplications (make it your
primary key)

the second table should have a field with the code but not
necessarily a primary key.

table 1 table 2
code name code date time
xxx xxxxxx xxx xxxxx xxxx
xxx xxxxx xxx

aaa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaaa
aaa xxxxx xxxxxxx




-----Original Message-----
Um Thanks but How do I do that? What would be an example
of a unique identifier? How do I build a relationship
between them? See I have never used Access before and am
unfimlular with it's language.
.

On Mon, 7 Jun 2004 12:51:05 -0700, "Tiffany Grace"
wrote:

I am trying to build a database. I work in a law firm and many clients have more than one court date. I have the columns Court date, Court Time, Court room #. I think this will be best for soting. I want to be able to have a client with two sepeate dates but not repeat his name and other information again. Is there anyway to do this.

Thanks for any reply.

You need *two tables* to do this: a table of Clients with fields like:

ClientID Autonumber or some other field that uniquely identifies the
client
LastName
FirstName
other bio information

and a separate table of CourtDates
ClientID link to the Clients table, use a Long Integer if it's an
autonumber
CourtDateTime store the date and time in the same field for ease of
sorting and searching
CourtRoom you may want a small table of valid courtroom numbers;
don't use # in fieldnames, Access can get confused


John W. Vinson[MVP]
Come for live chats every Tuesday and Thursday
http://go.compuserve.com/msdevapps?loc=us&access=public

If you don't know what he means by a relationship, the first thing you need to do is read up on relational databases and how they work. MS Access is a relational database. Without understanding this basic concept you will have trouble with any database you design. You can find several good websites by doing a google search for relational database design. I also highly recommend getting a book on MS Access at your local book store. There are many good resources available.

With that being said, to build the relationship table 2 which has your court data will need a field that contains the ID of the client in order to connect the court date to the client.

Your table layouts would be something like

Client table

ClientID(Could be client acct number)(Primary Key), Client Name, Address, City,...

Court table

Rec ID ,ClientID(This is a foreign key), Court Date, Court time, Room#, .....

The relationship between Client table ClientID and Court table ClientID is a one to many relationship.