I seem to have brain lock on this problem, I keep going round and round and can’t get a handle on it.

 

Given:

• A dump truck is given a ticket number for each load of gravel.
• Each load will be deposited in up to six numbered rail cars (usually not reused).
• Each rail car will contain gravel from one to three dump trucks.

 

Problem:

• Track which rail cars a truck load went into and the cubic yards from the truck.
• Track which trucks delivered to a rail car and the cubic yards of gravel in the rail car.

Help!

 

Thanks,

Al

Each load will be deposited in up to six numbered rail cars (usually not reused).

 

Do you mean that a single load can be divided among many rail cars? And what does "not reused" mean in this context?

 

 

--

P.S. Are you really using version 7?

Yes, a single load can be divided among many rail cars. The rail cars are not reused, I was trying to indicate that new rail cars are continually cycled in.

 

Oops! No, using 13.

If I am reading this correctly, you should have the following tables:

 

Trucks -< Loads -< Deposits >- RailCars

 

The Deposits table would have (at least) these fields:

• DepositID (auto-entered serial number)

• LoadID (or TicketNumber)

• RailCarID (or a unique rail car number)

• Amount

 

If you don't want to track the rail cars, you can do without the RailCars table. However, if you want to answer the question "how much gravel went into a specific rail car, from which trucks/loads?", you will need to either produce a report from the Deposits table, sorted and summarized by rail car, or enter a specific rail car number into a global field and get the data through a relationship based on the global.

 

Note that regardless of whether you track the rail cars or not, you will need some kind of mechanism to associate a rail car with the relevant deposits only. Otherwise, if a rail car was re-used several times during the year, you will not have a way to separate between the deposits made on different dates.

This is a late response. Thank you for your insight. You seem to have grasped exactly what I need. At this point I am unclear as to how I can designate the amount of gravel to be transferred to three rail cars from a single Truck. 

 

Making three deposits with the same LoadID and different RailCarID’s did not work as I had expected.

did not work as I had expected.

 

Not much to go on here.