New here, and a relatively new programmer in general. I've taken 3 years of programming in high school, including a year learning Python and two years learning Java, with one of those years at the AP level. I was recently hired for a summer job, and my company wants me to develop a database system to help them locate files which are stored in boxes in a warehouse.

So here's the basic premise of my problem

Boxes - they need to hold a bunch of information such as ID number, Barcode ID, location, company, etc, and they need to hold a list of files.

Files - They need to hold a bunch of information as well such as ID, date created...

The company wants things to be VERY searchable. As in they'll search for a file's title and they'll find what boxes it could be in, or they'll search for a Box and find what files are in it etc.

Being mostly a java programmer, though still a pretty inexperienced one, how I'd approach this in java conceptually would be to have an ArrayList of Box objects, which within them contain an ArrayList of files. However, storing this information and reading it repeatidly would seem to be quite complicated, as would creating a search mechanism, and well, it all just seems out of my league.

So, I figured working with Access would make sense. I've done some VERY minimal work in visual basic, I've probably forgotten just about all of it. My real issue is I have no idea how I'd organize this in Access, so if anyone could sort of point me in the right direction on this I'd be very grateful. It seems like MySQL would be a good idea here, but I know NOTHING about it and have been somewhat lost in tutorials...again I appreciate any ideas or suggestions, thanks.

See, your particular problem is to be solved in two stages.
1. Create a database having presently two tables.
Boxtable and Filetable

Boxtable will have all the fields which identify each of them.

Your filetable also should contain all those detail fields which your company looks for.

Both these tables will have one primary Key as your box id so that a particular information in the filetable identify that file as well as the box id in that one can be used to find the box in the boxtable.

A lot of data entry is required. It can wait. Only test data is to be fed in to these two tables now.
you can use, any database ACCESS MSSQL ORACLE etc.

2. Now is the program part.
VB6 is very user friendly. Especially creating forms, you need not write a single code. That will help you in your INPUT and OUTPUT jobs.

Then some coding you have to do yourself.

a. You have to establish a connection to your database.
b. A recordset is to be created to navigate into your tables for the required information.
Drawing those information, you have to present it to the user in a readable and meaningfull manner.

It is very simple.

Just get on to the job. When you are struck any where this forum will help you.

HAPPY PROGRAMMING

regards
AV Manoharan