Populating a Link Table

[jogrady]

I'm new to Access database development and was hoping to get some feedback from some veterans.

I'm creating a products database for a body jewelry company that sells 5000 different items. Right now each item is identified by a unique product code. The problem is each product code has multipe size and color variations. We have to track stock for each product variation so I'm going to create a unique value (skuID) for each color and size variation and associate it with ProductID. To accomplish this I've created three tables. One for products, one for each product variation called Skus, and a ProductConfig table to assign skus to products. Is this best practice? (I've read that I should avoid multi-value lookup fields for size and color combos.)

Here is where I run into problems....

I want Users to be able to create/modify/delete products and the skus associated with those products. Every product must have a Sku assigned. So, when a users creates a product in a form I want to give them the ability to create all the skus associated with that product too. How do I automatically associate the product ID to each skuID in the ProductConfig table as those products and skus get created via the form I'm going to build. Will I have to learn Visual Basic to do this? Do I create some sort of Macro? Does Access already know how to do this? I don't want to have to manually assign productsIDs to SkuIDs via lookup tables in the ProductsConfig table. That would be prone to error.

Thanks in adance for your help, advice, or just for pointing me in the right direction.

 

[Phildaburn]

Have you set this up in at least 3 tables: 1 - unique product code, 2 - available sizes, and 3 - available colors? Do you really want a user to be able to delete these records? Won't that destroy your sales history? Have you considered using a concatenation of the unique product code, a size code, and a color code as your skuID?