Relationships

[Fish218]

Please see attachment.

I'm interested in tblCollectionsC1, tblNetPanelDepth, and tblIndividualFish.

Are there any issues with setting up a relationship to what I have in the attachment. CollectionID (tblCollections) to both tblNetPanelDepth and tblIndividualFish and also have NetPanelID (tblNetPanelDepth) to tblIndividualFish?

I don't only want to relate tblNetPanelDepth to tblIndividualFish because if there are no fish then I would have no record of net depth. Should I remove the CollectionID relationship between tblCollectionsC1 and tblIndividualFish? Thanks.

[rpeare]

I do not understand the question. Perhaps an example of your data and what you want your end result to be.

[Fish218]

The issue I'm having is with circular relationships...I found another one and posted it in the thread "Is This Bad?"

[rpeare]

I don't really use relationships (I find them more limiting and annoying sometimes). Any time you have three tables making a triangle (each table relates to the other two) you're probably going to get a circular reference error. The relationships do NOT mean that you can't link tables however you want in queries so I would just remove the link between panel depth and collections.

[Fish218]

How do you not use relationships?

[rpeare]

You just don't set them up, the drawback is that when you create queries and you add multiple tables you have to establish the links between tables by hand every time, but to me it's a small price to pay for the aggravation of dealing with relationships.

[June7]

Setting relationships serves as a means to enforce referential integrity. Setting relationships is not required for building queries. If relationships are set then when you create a query using the tables the query join will automatically be established according to the relationship. If relationship not set then manually establish the join in the query. As rpeare pointed out established relationships can sometimes get in the way. I do have some relationships set and find that sometimes I don't want the tables joined in query according to the relationship. I have to delete the query join and then set it as I want it.