Question

compliment of the day.
Based on the previous feedback received,

After creating a Ticket sales database in MS Access. I want to use a single form to Query the price of a particular ticket at a particular month and have the price displayed back in the form in a text field or label.

Below are sample tables and used query

CompanyTable

CompID    CompName
   A        Ann
   B        Bahn
   C        Can
   KK       Seven
   -        --

TicketTable

 TicketCode    TicketDes

 10            Two people
 11            Monthly
 12            Weekend
 14            Daily

TicketPriceTable

 ID    TicketCode    Price    ValidFrom

  1    10            $35.50    8/1/2010
  2    10            $38.50    8/1/2011
  3    11            $20.50    8/1/2010
  4    11            $25.00    11/1/2011
  5    12            $50.50    12/1/2010
  6    12            $60.50    1/1/2011
  7    14            $15.50    2/1/2010
  8    14            $19.00    3/1/2011
  9    10            $40.50    4/1/2012

Used query:

SELECT TicketPriceTable.Price
 FROM TicketPriceTable
 WHERE (((TicketPriceTable.ValidFrom)=[DATE01]) AND ((TicketPriceTable.TicketCode)=[TCODE01]));

• In MS Access, a mini boxes pops up to enter the parameters when running the query. How can I use a single form to enter the parameters for [DATE01] and [TCODE01]. and the price displayed in the same form in a textfield (For further calculations).

Such as ‘Month’ field equals to input to [DATE01] parameter
‘Ticket Code’ equals to input for [TCODE01] parameter
Textfield equals to output of the query result (Ticket price)

• If possible, I would like to use only the Month and Year in this format MM/YYYY.The day is not necessarry. How can I achieve it in MS Access?

If any question, please don’t hesitate to ask
Thanks very much for your time and anticipated feedback.

Answer 1

Entering up to 300 different types of tickets

^{Answer to your comment referring to Accessing data from a ticket database, based on months in MS Access)}

You can use Cartesian products to create a lot of records. If you select two tables in a query but do not join them, the result is a Cartesian product, which means that every record from one table is combined with every record from the other.

Let’s add a new table called MonthTable

MonthNr    MonthName
    1      January
    2      February
    3      March
  ...      ...

Now if you combine this table containing 12 records with your TicketTable containing 4 records, you will get a result containing 48 records

SELECT M.MonthNr, M.MonthName, T.TicketCode, T.TicketDes
FROM MonthTable M, TicketTable T
ORDER BY M.MonthNr, T.TicketCode

You get something like this

MonthNr    MonthName   TicketCode  TicketDes
    1      January         10      Two people
    1      January         11      Monthly
    1      January         12      Weekend
    1      January         14      Daily
    2      February        10      Two people
    2      February        11      Monthly
    2      February        12      Weekend
    2      February        14      Daily
    3      March           10      Two people
    3      March           11      Monthly
    3      March           12      Weekend
    3      March           14      Daily
  ...      ...            ...      ...

You can also get the price actually valid for a ticket type like this

SELECT TicketCode, Price, ActualPeriod AS ValidFrom
FROM (SELECT TicketCode, MAX(ValidFrom) AS ActualPeriod
      FROM TicketPriceTable
      WHERE ValidFrom <= Date
      GROUP BY TicketCode) X
    INNER JOIN TicketPriceTable T
        ON X.TicketCode = T.TicketCode AND X.ActualPeriod=T.ValidFrom

The WHERE ValidFrom <= Date is in case that you entered future prices.

Here the subquery selects the actually valid period, i.e. the ValidFrom that applies for each TicketCode. If you find sub-selects a bit confusing, you can also store them as query in Access or as view in MySQL and base a subsequent query on them. This has the advantage that you can create them in the query designer.

Consider not creating all your 300 records physically, but just getting them dynamically from a Cartesian product.

I let you put all the pieces together now.