clarification Re: 2 people with same address - sometimes - standard data model? [really a user interface question]

i'm realizing now my original post was not clear. i was asking about data models when i should have been asking about user interfaces.

if i'm storing the same address for several different people it's fairly obvious i need to have an address table separate from my person table. if i have only one address per person, i can store a sequence key to the address table in my person table. if i have more than one address per person, i'll need another table in between. the exact structure of the address table is not really what i'm worried about right now. i might decide to use the zip to determine city & state for example (there are pros and cons to this).

my main question is, how should this look to the user doing address maintenance? it's going to be very common to have one address for one person. multiple people at an address is also going to be common.

i'd sort of like to show a person's address on the person screen, even if it's not stored in the person table. i have plenty of room on my screen for this and i don't like the idea of forcing the user to know that that there's more than one table being updated. maybe i'm being wrong-headed here.

i need a way to show when people live together on the screen and i need a way to change who lives with who. seems like i need to support a "move in with" and a "move out" operation and i need to make it easy to correct an address that has errors, regardless of how many people share it.

i might want to have my system automatically scan for duplicates when a new address is entered and ask the user whether they mean to have the new person living with an existing person or not. however, i want the user to have control over this decision. it may be, for example, that two people have similar addresses that are longer than the space i have allowed to store it, or that we have incomplete information, and that the two addresses are "different" even though they look the same. (the post office can and does deal with this by noticing the name.)

does anybody have a nice way to present this to the end user?

i apologize for my original unclear posting. it resulted from unclear thinking. Received on Fri Jan 13 1995 - 16:42:05 CET