Question

Hey I have 3 tables called STUDENT, COURSE and ENROLLMENT. STUDENT has a PK of S_ID(student ID) and COURSE has PK of C_ID(course ID). In enrollment it only has S_ID and C_ID. I have an object data source to show all the students name (in text, and S_ID as the value) in a drop down menu and it will show which courses he is registered in when clicked, using a datagrid and another object data source. I wont to have the student to have multiple courses to be registered too, but I cant do that because you cannot have the same ID in the COURSE table, so every student is only registered to one course.

Is there some sort of option to have same ID’s in a table?

If not, then I must some how manipulate the string in C_ID in the COURSE table because all the courses start with ISDVXXX or ITSXXXX or HGFXXXX. This may be hard to understand but hopefully someone will help.

An example may help
So if a student named Joe with a S_ID of 123 is registered to ISDV, he will be registered to all the courses that start with ISDV. But my problem is that my COURSE table has to have unique ID for each course such as ISDV123, ISDV346, ISDV395 etc… so this also ruins my enrollment table because I cannot simply have ISDV in there, it needs a specific course but he is registered to all of them. Any more clarification will be given 😛 Thanks…

Answer 1

What you’re trying to solve is a multi-valued attribute problem. Basically, you have two tables where one (students) has a primary key which is a foreign key in another table (classes). You don’t want to have multiples of the same class in the classes table, but you do want a student to be able to have multiple classes.

So, there is a very simple fix, you create another table which contains at least these two columns: student_id and class_id. This way, you could have a single class that multiple students are linked to, and also multiple classes to which a student can be linked to.