hi all,
i'm developing a database for my work (a university) to track awards and honors received by professors. i'm maybe 50% done, but i'm running into a conceptual problem with how to store and display these awards.
at first i thought i would do a check box list, with a list of the awards possible. then i could just check off the award if a professor received it. as you can guess, this quickly got out of hand since there are so many possible awards.
next i thought i would do a set of drop-down lists-- maybe 10 fields total, all with the same options. the drop-down option list is easily editable so this seemed like a great idea. i named the fields "award1", "award2", etc, and assigned all of them to the same option list.
this worked great until i tested the search function. it turns out search only works if the search query matches the field it's typed in. in other words, if the "acls" award showed in the "award3" field, but i typed the query in the "award1" field, no results would come up.
does anyone have ideas how i can get around this? the drop-down boxes work great and keep my database free to a bunch of extra data, but search is really important. i'm thinking there must be some way i can search for a single term in more than one field, but i don't know how to do it.
thanks for any replies! i'll keep searching for now and i'll post my solution if anyone's curious...
thanks,
joel
i'm developing a database for my work (a university) to track awards and honors received by professors. i'm maybe 50% done, but i'm running into a conceptual problem with how to store and display these awards.
at first i thought i would do a check box list, with a list of the awards possible. then i could just check off the award if a professor received it. as you can guess, this quickly got out of hand since there are so many possible awards.
next i thought i would do a set of drop-down lists-- maybe 10 fields total, all with the same options. the drop-down option list is easily editable so this seemed like a great idea. i named the fields "award1", "award2", etc, and assigned all of them to the same option list.
this worked great until i tested the search function. it turns out search only works if the search query matches the field it's typed in. in other words, if the "acls" award showed in the "award3" field, but i typed the query in the "award1" field, no results would come up.
does anyone have ideas how i can get around this? the drop-down boxes work great and keep my database free to a bunch of extra data, but search is really important. i'm thinking there must be some way i can search for a single term in more than one field, but i don't know how to do it.
thanks for any replies! i'll keep searching for now and i'll post my solution if anyone's curious...
thanks,
joel
