how to update a list of items? design question

[Peter Primrose]

Hi all,

I have a 2 tables with the following columns:
Table_A
IdA, Name

Table_B
IdB, IdA, car_number


say there's the following properties:
Table_A
IdA, Name
1 Toyota

Table_B
IdB, IdA, car_number
1 1 101
2 1 102
3 1 109
4 1 230
5 1 343
.
.

GUI: the data in table_b (the car_number) is given as textArea and the user write just numbers inside (100,101...)

Q: say the user returns to the textArea (data already existed in db and the user returns to edit/update the data) and made some changes example deleted number 101 and added 554 and 212

How can I make an UPDATE if I don't have the idBs (there are only numbers in the textArea)? *Assuming I can save an old version of the car_numbers with the idea, how do I still make an update?

thanks for any pointers

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Peter,
There are two approaches. You can save the ids in a map in memory. Or you can look up the id in the database based on car number.

[Peter Primrose]

what if I do this:
I Delete all old info and Insert the new one. it will work but is there a trade off for that?

[D Rog]

What other queries do you do against these tables? Because i do not see any reason of having separate ids for every car number.

Regarding delete and re-insert. You can try to add a columnt last, and do a simple update of records setting for new records last to 1 and for old to 0. If you have more records, then you had, then switch to insert mode. I do not see benefits of this approach, however it works in some of my systems.