MS Word Mail Merge Problem

I think you want all the books to show up for every record.

To do this, you need to join to multiple instances of the overdue books. Estimate the maximum number of overdue books. if that number is over about 250, you're SOL as you can only get 256 fields from a query.

SELECT M.*, B1.Title, B2.Title, B3.Title, B4.Title, B5.Title .... Bn.Title
FROM Member as M inner join loans as L
on M.uniqueId = L.UniqueIdMember
INNER JOIN Books as B1
ON L.uniqueId = B1.UniqueIdLoan
INNER JOIN Books as B2
ON L.uniqueId = B2.UniqueIdLoan
INNER JOIN Books as B3
ON L.uniqueId = B3.UniqueIdLoan
...
INNER JOIN Books as Bn
ON L.uniqueId = Bn.UniqueIdLoan
WHERE (Pick first Book from B1)
and (Pick second book or NULL from B2)
and (Pick second book or NULL from B3)
...
and (Pick third book or NULL from B3)

Sorry, I can't help you with the picking the book part until we know more about what the table looks like.

Looks like you're in the process of building this.

Add an int field to the books table called "BookNumber"

With Each loan, assign the books a number from 1 .. n (Remember to limit the number of books out at one loan to < 250 or so)
Then, when you're doing your query for books signed out, in your where condition use:

B1.BookNumber= 1
and
B2.BookNumber=2
and
B2.BookNumber=3
and
...
and
Bn.BookNumber=n

That'll do ya

Thanks.

Books Table:

BookNumber*
Title
Author
Cat
Certificate
LoanNumber (foreign Key)

Loans Table:

LoanNumber*
DateLoaned
DateDue
MemberNumber (foreign Key)

Members Table:

MemberNumber*
FirstName
Surname
DOB
Address1
Address2
TownCity
Postcode
PhoneNumber

--------------------------------
Relationships:

Members Table:-one to many-: Loans Table

Loans Table:-one to many-: Books Table

---------------------------------

I was hoping that those 'fields' used especially for mail-merging (In MS Word) could be used instead. The followoing seemed particularly interesting but they don't allow '{NEXT}' fields inside the braces :(

{NEXTIF}
{NEXT}
{IF}
{COMPARE}

and also these word fields (available as drop-down when mail-merging):

'If ... then ... else'

'Record...'

'Next Record If...'

'Skip Record if ...'

If I could actually compare current record's index e.g. MemberNumber with the next record's MemberNumber then i could just insert three statements comparing current MemberNumber with the next three consecutive MemberNumbers, then I could insert a statement after the conditional statements. (I say three because each person can only borrow upto four books).

Can anyone help...please?

Thanks for the posts. I was hoping to keep the DB as simple as possible....that's one of the reasons why I was hoping to clear this mess up at the Word-end of things. After all, it is a simple DB at the moment and I'm sure I've done this before i.e. conditional statements on the mail merged data entering Word.

:D