I have a question that I hope I can explain well enough:

I am trying to figure out a data structure for an inventory system. The
system contains:

        Items
        Kits    (Made from a collection of Items and/or other Kits)

Now my question is:

Is there any way to structure this in a database so that I could run a
single query to get the contents of a kit, even though it contains other
kits?

My problems occur when I try to create the tables as so:

ITEMS:          KIT_CONTENTS            KITS
                        KIT_ID<---------------->KIT_ID
ITEM_ID<--------->ITEM_ID                       Description
Description
Price
Etc

The only way I could think of to allow a kit to be contained within a kit:

Add another field to KIT_CONTENTS called Sub_Kit

Which seems like a dumb way of doing it, because first of all, most kits
don't have sub kits, so that would be a wasted field in most cases.
Secondly, as far as I know the application logic would have to do multiple
queries's to get the sub_kits.

I really hope there is a simple and more logical way to do this, preferably
allowing me to run a SINGLE query that will show a kit with all its sub
kits. Otherwise I would need to have repeated queries from the application
logic, and I really want to avoid that.

Please help, thanks.


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