I have an Access database that I am using as the backend with ASP.Net
The Access DB contains fields such as "step#" "instructions" "date"
The problem I am having is some of the instructions contain data that not text. Some "instructions" will have yes/no, some will have 1 textbox, some will have 3 textboxes within that record to be filled out. How can I make this in Access and retrieve this in ASP.net? I guess you may call it a table within a table???
thank you
jc

I think you need to resolve your data type and structure issues, and then code to pass those types and structures.

If you want this additional table, you would need to create one with all possible field values, and then link it to the main table. That way each record in the main table could have one or many instruction fields of various types.

Each record in the instruction table would have all fields in it, and some may be blank.

This sounds like a mess.

tblMain
MainID - PK
StepNo - Number of Text
Date - date

tblInstruction
InstructionID - PK
MainID - FK
FieldType1 - Y/N
FieldType2 - text
FieldType3 - text
...

Then when you pull tblMain.MainID, StepNo, Date, tblInstruction.FieldType1 etc Join On tblMain.MainID = tblInstruction.MainID you can concatenate all of the fields from tblInstruction and use the alias "Instructions" when presenting the data.

Does that help?


mmcdonal

Sorry, that should be:

StepNo - Number OR Text


in tblMain.


mmcdonal

Yes, that makes perfect sense. I was thinking that i would need to make a separate table that has those conditions (y/n, textbox, textarea, etc). My problem was linking and associating them. Like how would step 1 in table main know that it requires a textbox, how would step 2 know that it requires a fill in table with 4 cols and 8 rows for data, how would step know know it requires a checkbox, etc? The date I am working with is a complete mess, i am now getting the structure correct, but this table has the most problems, because it requires some input. I hope i am making sense explaining this.
thanks for your help
jc