Need Help With Design of multiple choices for repeated field

[helix]

I am wanting to find a smooth, efficient way to design the controls for the following task:



Lesson - this is a field that has a choice of names for various lessons
Such as Attention, Communication, Focus, etc

Concepts - there are 10 concepts from which to choose

Each lesson will have 4 or 5 concepts that are covered in the lesson

What would be the best design for the form for the user to choose which 4 or 5 concepts are covered in a given lesson?

Example: Lesson = Communication

• concept #1 is chosen
• concept #4 is chosen
• concept #5 is chosen
• concept #8 is chosen
• concept #9 is chosen

I could use 5 combo boxes but that seems really clunky. And using 5 combo boxes doesn't allow for that time that someone decides they really need 6 concepts listed for a given lesson.

I thought of a group of yes/no checkboxes, one for each concept. But I want to have it so the number of available choices for the concepts can be expanded at any time. A group of checkboxes would not allow for that.

Thank you for any suggestions you have!

[orange]

Can you post a picture of your tables and relationships?

[helix]

Right now there are two separate tables: Lessons and Concepts. They are not yet related because I haven't decided how to do that.

What I think I will do is add fields to the Lesson table:

concept1
concept2
concept3
concept4
concept5

But again, that limits me to only 5 concepts.

I thought of a combined table: LessonConcept in which I can have an infinite number of concepts
Table LessonConcept:

LessonConceptID
LessonID
LessonName
ConceptID
ConceptName

This table would then be linked to Lesson table via LessonID and to Concept Table via ConceptID.

I haven't done this yet but there is likely where I am headed.

Helix

[orange]

A suggestion. 3 tables.

Lessons Table ----- LessonHasConcept Junction Table --- Concepts Table

[DianeG]

I would put all the choices possible in a subtable, refer the field in the main table to that subtable so that you have a drop down for that field and you can make the drop down so they can choose as many answers as they want by turning on the Allow Multiple Values. You can always add more choices to the subtable if you need more. See the Sample database that I attached.