Cattle/ animal management

[slaterdav]

I have got myself over my head and am looking for help. I am using Access 2003 and have established a database with over 250 animals. I have been able to do forms and reports but am way over my head when trying to Queries. I basically am trying to be able to list all my Cows and then select the cow and have all it's offspring appear. I will apreciate any help.

Thank you in advance

Dave

[NeoPa]

I would first consider trawling through some tutorials to get yourself up to speed at least to a basic level. It's very difficult even to understand what is suggested when you don't have a grasp of the fundamental concepts.

That done, check out Example Filtering on a Form for a solution to your particular problem.

Welcome to Bytes!

[youmike]

Hi Dave - I think what you are looking for is help to build a family tree application. If so, a topic that you need to trawl for tutorials about is the way to design to allow related records to be retrieved. Basically, the record for a specific cow will need a field into which you can put an identity number for that cow's mother. If you need to record the father too, that can be similarly achieved. Bear in mind, though, that family trees sometime need more complex arrangements, but if you start with a MotherId & FatherId on each record, you've made a useful start.

Good luck!

[youmike]

I should have added a suggestion to try Alan Brownes website (www.alanbrowne.com) for a series of graded tips, which I've found very useful. They have much relevant to database design, particularly table structure and relationships and the whole issue of data normalization. Preliminary work in these areas will ultimately be worth the effort, I'd say.