21/11/07 Wednesday morning double period

As our new blogging website (www.finnegas.net) is not working currently, I will use this blog to report on progress.

Today, there has been no progress with coursework because I am currently stuck trying to add an editable 'DetailsView' table, which does not seem to work and there does not seem to be a solution, unless I just use a table which shows all the records at once.
However, even this table has problems, such as the inability to add drop-down menus to fields, like in my MS Access database.

Also, I can not move any further with reports because we have not covered them yet. I have a rough idea of what I have to do though so I'll try and add some reports.

8/10/07

On Monday, we continued on with our coursework project. I spent more time adding new pages to the site and linking up the new buttons to the right pages. Then, I added the REACH Across database to my website using the Database Manager and successfully added a list of all members (which can be edited and sorted) table to the website. However, I found that on editing the table, you do not get drop-down menus like you did with the database I created with MS Access. This means for typing in religion for a member, the usual two options are either 'Catholic' or 'Protestant', but on the website, there are no options or clues to what is to be entered there, meaning data inconsistencies could result, if for example someone spells 'Catholic' wrongly when entering it here.
I had trouble trying to add new tables, which I based on queries of which I used on my database from last year.

We had to summarise the Network security chapter from the textbook on Tuesday and complete questions for homework. This has been completed.

2nd November 2007

Our homework over the mid-term break was to complete section 3 of the normalisation workbook. I have completed the majority of the 9 tasks, but some I have not because I have not been able to understand them. One task asks me to normalise a database, but this one has two repeating groups, and there are no clear instructions as to how you go about normalising when there are two repeating groups.

And in task 9, it asks you to normalise a database, but this situation is different from any of the given examples because it only has 1 primary key (and one foreign key) rather than 2 primary keys and a foreign key and I do not know how you should group the attributes into which tables.

The textbook homework has been fully completed (Deadlock notes and main terms: revisited sections).