Hi,

I have a VFP system (front and back end are both VFP) where my client enters time worked for a few hundred employees on a weekly basis.

My TimeWorked table to capture this is:

EmployeeID
LocationID
Date
Time Start
Time End

and a few extra fields irrelevant to this discussion.

They want to change the data entry screen to make it easier for them.

The screen will allow entering all times for all employees at a particular location for an entire week in one go.

So they'll select the Location and the date of the Monday of the week, all the employees scheduled to work at this location for this week will be displayed in a grid with the following columns:

Employee, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and some other columns again not that relevant. In each of the day columns they want to be able to enter the start and end time.

So this is a sort of pivot table view of the data from my TimeWorked table.

Displaying it in this new format and then massaging it back to save in my existing table will take some major fiddling/programming, so I am considering de-normalising my table to something like this:

EmployeeID
LocationID
Date
MondayStart
MondayEnd
TuesdayStart
TuesdayEnd

and so on.

What do you all think? Is this a good enough reason to de-normalise?