services wanted Will pay for help with relationship

[Peter Bowen]

The post title sounds like something you'd see on a dating site

Background - I had an web based app developed in MySql which works OK but I want to develop a desktop version myself rather than having to struggle with the coder everytime I need a minor change.

Problem: I don't know how to build one of the relationships

The application is a task planning tool which allows you to assign a recurrence to a task.

Tasks can occur in one of eight ways:

1. Every x number of days

2. Every weekday

3. Every x weeks on x day (eg every 3 weeks on a tuesday)

4. Day x of every x months (eg 1st of every 2nd month)

5. x x every x months (eg last workday of every 1 month)

6. Dax x of x month (eg 3rd of January every year)

7. x x of x month (eg first tuesday of March every year)

8. As needed

I need to be able to assign the recurrence to each task and then produce a report sorting the task list by the recurrence.

Unfortunately I can ask the orginal developer to explain the relationship to me (she got fired but that's another story altogether)

I'm going to be selling the app so I'm not expecting a free solution here and am happy to pay for the advice. If you have any suggestions as to how this can be done and are willing to explain them to me I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee.

Please contact me by email to [email protected]

Thanks

Pete

[David McQueen]

This does not sound so much like a relational problem as perhaps a structural or scripting problem.

1. A task is a generic sort of thing and it's own entity. Examples:

Meeting

Phone Call

Turn Valve

Do the books

These can be in their own table or if there are a limited number of them, one could just use a value list.

2. What you call a recurrance of a task is an event. This is a different entity than a task and would require it's own table. To properly describe an event would require several things, among them perhaps:

1. Task

2. Date

3. Time

4. Who assigned it

5. Who does it

.

.

.

AND its own unique identifier - "PrimeKey"

The number of things required to describe the event will give you a hint as to the number of tables you will require.

Your main problem seems to be an algorithm or algorithms that will mirror the methods in which you want automate the creation of multiple event records for events that are essentially identical except for the date.

Once you can do that, display of events should not be that big a deal, either relationally or using search and summary report techniques.

HTH

Dave McQueen

[Fenton]

sorting the task list by the recurrence

This statement is vague. Sort a bunch of already created events by date? Well, obviously sort by date, so that can't be your question; unless you haven't created the events yet, in which case you need a routine to check for and create them, which runs on startup or when you look at them.

If you mean to sort them by their recurence, as you say, then you'd just need another calculation to look at each of those choices and produce a number, from 1 to whatever (non-recurring events being 1, "as needed" being ?).