title: Associative Relationship With Multiple Tables (MS Access)
body: <p>I've not really used access for a while and not too sure how best to proceed with this data model:</p>
  
  <p>I have set of resource tables of differing type, eg: Data, Literature, Contractors, etc.
  I also have a set of category tables such as Procedures, Topics, and Regions.</p>
  
  <p>I need to create many-to-many relationships between the various resources and the various categories so it is possible to view a resource record and see lists of the various categories to which the resource is allocated, and vice-versa, that is to view all resources allocated to a specific category. </p>
  
  <p>I realise that I could create lots of link tables, eg: LnkDataProcs, LnkDataTopics, etc, however with perhaps 10 resource tables and 3 category tables I would wind up with 30-odd link tables which seems wrong (it may also be useful to query all resources from each category anyway so it would be good to have one link table for each category).</p>
  
  <p>I've done this kind of thing before using SQL in custom DB client apps by using one link table with fields as follows: CategoryTable, CategoryID, ResourceTable, ResourceID - So that the link table stores the table name as well as the foreign key.  </p>
  
  <p>However I'm not too sure how to fit this kind of model into an access database, it would be nice to use the Access framework (master-child form objects) rather than having to write loads of custom code to perform queries and populate forms.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas how to proceed, or even what this kind of relationship is called?</p>