Relationships of aircraft

[biggles1212]

Creating a pilots logbook database.

I have a layout where you enter things like the date, the type of aircraft flown, its registration etc.

I want the details of the aircraft (registration and type) to be linked (or have a relationship to) another table.

 

The reason is I want to eventually auto-populate some fields so when the person types in 'KKK' the database recognises KKK as a C172. Another reason is to keep the aircraft types uniform when searching in other layouts as you can write C172 also as C-172.

 

How would I go about this?
Cheers!

[eos]

Creating a pilots logbook database.

I have a layout where you enter things like the date, the type of aircraft flown, its registration etc.

I want the details of the aircraft (registration and type) to be linked (or have a relationship to) another table.

Cheers!

 

Since we're talking about existing aircraft, your first step should be to create and maintain an Aircrafts table. This is where type, registration and all the other data unique to that particular aircraft go.

 

Then a log book entry is a child record of an aircraft record created in a new Logs tables, and you'd only enter data that is unique to that flight (date, duration, pilot (which could/would be another foreign key coming from another parents table), etc.).

 

Now there is no need to lookup or copy any data, because in a Logs context, you can simply display the data of the parent (related) aircraft, while in an Aircrafts context, you can use e.g. a portal to show and edit the existing log entries, and add new ones, which will automatically be associated with the current aircraft.

 

Taking this further, depending on your requirements you'd have an additional table Types, and a structure like

 

Types --> Aircrafts --> Logs <-- Pilots