Access based Sony photo camera manual

[Isaac_h_e]

Hello,



First of all let me state that I'm a newbie in the Access world so please excuse my incompetence generally speaking.

Now let me explain what I would like to create, some days ago I got a Sony photo camera that got a massive menu structure that is, in my opinion, poorly dealt with in the current Sony PDF manual. For the most part a PDF is a document that does not fit well the level of complexity of Sony cameras menu, which, by the way, now is standardized along their product line, so one manual should fit all with some caveats...

The camera menu structure is very similar to what you would see in a PC folder structure with up to 7 levels of indentation, so pretty deep if you ask me.

How would you design the database?

What I currently have is 5 tables, 4 that contain each menu level (there are still 3 levels missing because I'm not sure that my approach is actually ideal) and one table that contains the relationships in between the other tables (what menu option is "hanging" from whatever higher level). Would you say that my approach makes sense?

So far I have been inputting the data directly in the tables because I'm used to Excel but as you can Imagine as I go deeper in to the menus it becomes more difficult to track what I have and what I haven't done... so I guess I should provably be using form to properly input data in to the tables but unfortunately I'm unsure on how to tackle the task.

Many thanks and best regards.

Isaac

[CJ_London]

You’re design is intrinsically wrong (4 menu tables) as a menu level is data and should not be handled by way of a table name

In principle you need one table with a menu identifier and the text



The menu identifier could be one field e.g.

chapter 1 could be ‘01’
chapter 2, menu 3 could be ‘02-03’
a sub menu of that menu could be ‘02-03-01’
etc

if there are more than 99 chapters you would need to make it ‘001’

alternatively you could have a field for each menu level and populate as required - but that would require modifying tables and related forms/reports in the event you discover a new level

finally there is a method called recursion but that is probably more complex than you need. Google to find out more but in principle you have two fields. A primary key and a parent key - so the above example might look like

pk….parent
1……null
2……null
3……2
4……3

[Isaac_h_e]

First of all let me say thanks CJ, I really do appreciate your response.

Unfortunately by reading your response I think that I have done a poor job at explaining myself, my objective is to create an schematic representation of the camera menus in the form of a DB so that it serves as a guide for newcomers to Sony's OS, I'm not really trying to rewrite Sony's PDF manual.

As I'm having hard time trying to convey to the community what I'm looking for I think the best course of action for me will be to share an Excel file that does have an unfinished version of the camera menus, hopefully the Excel file will be clear enough so if ti isn't please let me know (it is m'y first time sharing it so it may not be the best document ever).
Menus.zip

Thanks

Isaac