Ok, I was a bit vague after reading it again.
I have a situation in my database design where
Clients can have many Brands
Brands can have many Products
Products can have many Projects
Now basically this PHP/Mysql application that allows this company to keep track of all there work they do for there clients among other things. The application allows the user to add/edit/change status(active, inactive) of new clients,brands, products and projects.
The problem as it where is,
A project may be assosicated with a product and/or brand. But I must also allow for a situation where there is no product or brand assosciated with the project. So effectively it is just associated with a client.
So what I did and admittly I\'m not sure it is the best way to do it, is: When a person adds a project that is not assosciated with a brand or product I create a new brand and new product with the same name as the client so this way I know if client name = brand name then there is no brand assosicated with this project etc. Also if the \'default\' brand or product already exists then I just hang the new project off the already created default brand or project.
You see when I started out doing the database design, I couldn\'t see a way to allow for this in just pure MySQL/database design, so I made this ad hoc way of dealing with it.
So from what you see there, is there something I could have done different to make it more simplier.