"neighbor" association

[nopposan]

Hello again.

'Just got another stumper to puzzle on.

I have a table of patients and a table of tests. There can be more than one test per patient, and therefore the test table is the child of the patient table; I've related them by serialized patient-record ID's. Now, the patient samples are tested 2 patients per test slide. So, to utilize certain quality controls and have certain quality assurance, we need to keep track of which patients were neighbors on the test slide. Is that clear?

To put it another way, I need to associate patient tests with one another based on whether these tests were run adjacent to one another on a microscope slide.

It's obvious that only one entry should be necessary to record the association between the two test records; I suppose that entry should automatically populate or be looked up by fields in each test record.

This seems to be quite different from everything I've done so far; that's been based on calculations, relationships, and lookups that ultimately refer back to the same patient record in the parent table.

I hope I've made myself understood. If you think you may be able to help, then please give me some good advice or direct me to a useful link.

Thank you.

Edited May 8, 2008 by Guest
clarity

[comment]

You could add a SlideID field to the Tests table and define a self-join relationship matching on this field. Or you could have a table of Slides, and write the two TestID numbers there, using it to join the two tests. There's not much difference between the two, it depends more on the workflow than anything else.

[nopposan]

Thanks. That worked.