When I originally wrote my online database administration pages I went for the simple approach. As a consequence, I just displayed the values of the fields as they appeared in the tables. Here's an example of how that looked:
Action
|CarID
|MakeID
|Model
|ColorID
Edit Delete
1
2
C3500 Dooley
1
Edit Delete
2
7
Town and Country
8
Edit Delete
3
3
Grand Am
1
The CarID is an auto-number primary key, and hence is just displayed as-is - no problem there since you cannot edit that anyway. But the MakeID and ColorID fields are primary keys from other tables - CarMakes and CarColors.
Using the Relationships tool in Access I had already linked the fields to the relevant table. This creates "foreign keys" which we have access to from our ASP pages.
The improvement I recently made takes advantage of this data, and creates list boxes of the linked tables for display or editing. The list box contents are stored in Application variables for efficiency - I'll show you how all this is done in this article. The results are shown below - a huge improvement!
