Creating and storing data with submenus

[Lourry]

Hello All,

I am in desparate help. I am a beginner in using MS Access

I have an existing table in an Oracle database and I am creating a form in Access that allow useres to add/delete/modify records. One of the fields in the table is "Serial Number" and it stores computer serial numbers. There are other fields on the form but this field is for the user to identify which computer has problems. Here is how the data is stored in the Oracle database in the column "Serial Number":

Sony-Laptop-Z1-xxxxxxxx

This is how the user chooses on the form (at least this is how I would like it to look like):

A user will choose from list #1 "Computer Brands" which will have IBM, SONY, DELL, COMPAQ...etc then after choosing for example Sony (from above example) a second list will popup with values such as Laptop, desktop then after choosing for example Laptop then a third list will popup with models for example Z1 then a forth list will popup with serial numbers. Then the value stored back to the Oracle table will concatenate all the highligted elements in the listboxes with a "-" in between just like Sony-Laptop-Z1-xxxxxxxx.

How do I go about starting this? I need to know how to create these pop up "submenus" and how to make it so that the value stored is a concatenation of all the elements in the listboxes and if a user search the table for a record, will the values be highlighted automatically in the corresponding listbox according to what is stored in the tables?

Thanks in advance! I really hope you guys can help me!

-Lory

 

[Pat Hartman]

You should not lump the four fields into a single field. They should be stored separately. It is poor practice to create non-atomic fields and you will find the field difficult to work with both to create and then to use. Eventually, you would want statistics on Laptops or Sony's, etc. Getting stats will require only simple queries if the data is properly normalized.

To accomplish the "cascading", look up cascading combos. There are dozens of posts on this topic.