Complete newbie...desperate for help

[larine]

I'm creating a database consisting of a listing of researchers, their contact information, what institution they are affiliated with and their research skills/interests. I'm confused about a few basic things:

1. Do I need separate tables for these 3 items? (contact, institution, research skills/interests?

2. This is a public db web published. I want people to have a main page publicly accessible where a member can do a search for another researcher based on location, skills or interests. How do I do this correctly? Portals/reports/or..? What I have done so far is set up a "main" layout with fields and a search button which runs a script going into find mode, then displays a report in a "results" layout. This seems OK, but there are problems....

#1. I put a button under each record to "see more information about this researcher", but when I click it it displays detailed information for the entire set of results? If there is only one result it works as I want it to.

#2. I want to be able to search by research interest. In my DB I have several fields containing the research keywords (keyword1, keyword2 etc). Is it possible to create a value list created from values from more than one field? Also how can I search these multiple fields for a keyword and display the results?

I appreciate any feedback you can offer....I seriously need help!

[Inky Phil]

Hi larine and welcome to the forums,

I will try and help.

I do not think that you need seperate tables for contact/institution but you may need a seperate table for research skills/interests. I say this because I am presuming (I know... you should never presume) that each researcher only has one name, one set of contact information but possibly many skills/interests.

So I suggest name and contact info will be held in the main table and skills will be held in another.

Each researcher should be allocated a unique ID which should be the key field on each side of the relationship. This will allow you to show all the interests for any one individual

2/ #1 Once you have found your 'set' of people who match your find you need to isolate this down to one individual. Once again you can use the unique ID to display that one persons data either from the same table or from the skills table.

2/ #2 We will come back to this once we have worked through the other points cos I am not too sure what level of understanding that you have. If what I have already said needs further explanation then get back to me and I will do a sample file for you take apart and see what i mean

HTH

Phil