Hello again Jorge,

It's a tricky issue, isn't it?, knowing just when to stop normalizing. As I said, it depends on the requirements, they needed to work with thousands of items, which turned out to be a bad idea, they are now reducing they're catalog to what they can really sell, but the model adapts very well to both cases.

Very tricky.

This client is what I call a "micro-manager", in that the details of all facets of the business are under his eye in detail. Knowing this, I figured that giving him all the data he needs in the simplest form would be best. Now he can prowl with Excel to his heart's content, and I am not stuck generating custom forms/reports at his every whim. With the variety of products he sells, I saw your method getting out of my control very quickly - though I did consider it. I found that I could meet all his needs with 4 tables, and left it at that. Easier for me, easier for him.

To tell you the truth, I would love to be able to reduce it to something like
>
>5170WHS Cotton t-shirt
>
>That would be a small white cotton T-Shirt, plain and simple, but there's a number of issues with that, among them, some items have complicated color combinations, and it would be up to whoever registers the item to come up with a short version of it, not a good idea, they came up with some codes the likes of WHITESHIRT, DENIMPANTS , REALLYCOOLSHIRTONSALE, heck that's not a code that's a description, so I believe you have to set some limits and somehow guide them to keep a clean catalog, and I believe having them pick a predefined class, color and size, helps acomplish that.

Yes, determination of these 'codes' by the data entry operator is failure prone. We standardized on using the manufacturer's product codes verbatim - no guess work on the operator's part. In the Products table, I built in a description field to carry the "REALLYCOOLSHIRTONSALE" stuff - so far, used very little or not at all. "100 001-WHITE A L 6 3 UP16834" is all they seem to need, productid, color/style, categoryid, size, stocking quantities, and the unique barcode string. I can ask anyone using the system "Hey, what is a Landau 7502?" and they KNOW. The only real choices at data entry are to assign a category ID (only 8 choices in 3 years) and the sizing matrix that applies (again, only 8 thus far). Very simple and low maintenance. This is one of the few apps I have done that I am very proud of - though I still want to tear it apart and do it again :>) Isn't it always the way?