Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I'm a rookie to Open Office, but it is the tool I am using to build an application for a client. Want to get some best practices before attempting to design the forms.

The project is a music library application, main function is to categorize music for a band to simplify things, a piece of music may have several people associated with it (composer, arranger, lyricist, etc) A person may be a composer for one piece of music and an arranger for a different piece.

So we have tables as follows

SELECTION (fields chart_id, title, genre) - This is the main selection
PEOPLE (fields people_id, last_name, first_name, bio) - This is the list of all "people"
PEOPLE_TYPE (fields type_code, type_name) - Contains the lookup for type of people, A=Arranger, C=Composer, etc
SELECTION_PEOPLE (fields chart_id, people_id, type_code) - this is the relational table that ties the pieces together.

So for example a SELECTION might be (1, Rock This Town, Rockabilly)
It may have several SELECTION_PEOPLE (1, 1, C) (1, 2, A)
Which would correspond to PEOPLE (1, Setzer, Brian, bio data) (2, Wolpe, Dave, bio data)
and to PEOPLE_TYPE (A, Arranger) (C, Composer)

Operationally, a user should be able to scroll through "SELECTION" records. On each selection the user should see a list displayed of associated people (SELECTION_PEOPLE) and should be able to modify or delete them. The user should also be able to add a new associated person (PEOPLE) from the existing list of people, or should be able to create a new people record.

This is one of several scenarios (I've simplified for clarity, the project also involves PARTS, and other components needed to file music in the library, but the best practices for the other pieces can be built in a similar manner to a good solution here) I'm looking for best practice/design using forms/subforms as necessary to build the functionality.

Look in the Examples area of Base Tutorials on this Forum, there are a number of examples you might find helpful, including
viewtopic.php?f=100&t=40444#p186046
and
viewtopic.php?f=100&t=42845

Operationally, a user should be able to scroll through "SELECTION" records. On each selection the user should see a list displayed of associated people (SELECTION_PEOPLE) and should be able to modify or delete them.

As you suggested a MainForm/SubForm arrangement would probably work for this.

The user should also be able to add a new associated person (PEOPLE) from the existing list of people, or should be able to create a new people record.

ListBoxes or ComboBoxes might be a way to accomplish this.

Like this? R