Stuck outside a relationship....

[Jaded]

I have a table that in amongst its fields has a name field, and then three category fields and three category description fields.

Basically a simple webform gets people to fill out their details on-line and select (up to) three times one of ten categories. So they might have one, two or three of the category fields with data in. They can even select the same category three times. They also have to put a title in related to each category they choose.

e.g.

Name: Jones

Category1: "3"

CategeroyTitle: "Artistic practices in the late 1400s"

Category2: "5"

CategeroyTitle: "Mathematical experiments on rats"

Category3: ""

CategeroyTitle: ""

in this case the field Category3 is empty, as is it's corresponding title.

What I need is a table with all the category entries it in, regardless of whether they were entered on the webform in 1, 2 or 3.

So the new table would have:

Category:

Title:

Name:

and for the example from above therefore, Jones would be entered twice in this new table, oncve for category 3 and once for category 5

Does this sound completely mad? It certainly looks that way to me!!

[Ender]

I don't know how this fits into your web form, but if the category choices are stored a related table, then your users can select a category through a portal. The CategoryChoice records in that table need only consist of the CategoryID and CustomerID (or whatever is your primary key in the parent table.) You can access the Name through the relationship to the parent table, and access the Category Title through a relationship to a Category table.

Having these category choices in a separate table is a good idea if you need to do any type of reporting on these choices. It's much easier to summarize this in separate records.