Unique Records through a portal

[AKSHUN]

The problem I have just encountered is this.

I'm creating a program to track my opinions of movies, actors and studios.

I have a table for the movies, one for the actors, and one for the studios.

I want to be able to enter the cast through a portal in the movie table.

I can create entries in the actors table through my portal from the movie table, but the problem is that if an actor is in more than one movie there is more than one entry in the actors table. Anyone have any ideas as to how I should proceed?

[Ugo DI LUCA]

You should use a Join Table, call it ActorInMovies, where you will enter either the ActorID and the MovieID.

This allows One to Many or Many to Many relationships.

Then your portal will point to the Join Table to list all the movies affiliated to an actor, and the same for Studios...which could need a MovieInStudio Join.

This is commonly called Join Table, Join File (in 6) and a lot of posts related to business stuff (where one customer can have many invoice and product may appear in many invoice for many customers) would use a Line Items.

Make a quick search here on the Forums, and you'd have enough to read for a while.

HTH

[Ender]

Hey AKSHUN,

Sounds like an interesting design project. In case you're not familiar with it, imdb.com is a great movie database. It might give you ideas (and data!) about things to include in your design.

I've attached an ER diagram of the basic structure for what you've described. You'll notice that I show a Member table where you indicated an Actor table. I used a general term, figuring you may want to use the same structure to keep other members of the production team, like Director, Producer, etc. The Role table is the join table Ugo described.

Have fun!

[Ugo DI LUCA]

Of course, a movie has a unique Studio. My bad, I was thinking of registering Studios.

[Lee Smith]

There are some resource files at FM Files - Home and Internet - Movie Collections that you might want to look at.

Also, check out this file by cjaeger here in the Forums Sample File Topic Area

HTH

Lee

[AKSHUN]

IMDB was my inspiration for the project. Basically I have a friend who is a REAL movie buff. His personal collection is as large as many smaller video rental outfits. I wanted to give him this so that he could simplify tracking his reviews of the movies, and even whom he has loaned movies to.

[AKSHUN]

Thanks for the heads up. I am having problems with getting relevant search results for join tables. Do you have any suggestions on what my search parameters should be?