Clearing a link to another record? Is this legal?

[yoki]

Hi,

Let's say I have two tables. Let's call them Main & Author.

Main has 2 fields:
Main_ID (primary key, autoincrement, int(11) )
Author_ID (int(11) )

Author has two fields:
Author_ID
(primary key, autoincrement, int(11) )
Author Name (varchar(100) )

Now let's say I have a function that wants to clear the Author_ID in my table Main.

In this function I assign value 0 to Author_ID. Is this the right way to do? What would be an other way of doing this?

[gammaster]

Hi!
It`s no problem to set the Author_ID in the main table to '0', but how smart it is depends on what you are doing. If the row in the main table where you set the Author_ID to '0' will be assigned an other value later it should be ok, but if you never will use the row in main table again you should probebly delete the row.

More info. is needed to give the right answer to this.