Relationship problem

Hi All... Two of my tables are:

Users - primary key is UserId, an int with identity turned on.

Messages - has a column named UserId that references the same in Users.

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 against a SQL 2005 database.

Using both the diagram tool and table data, I'm trying to set up the relationship implied above and am getting the following error:

Users table saved successfully.

Messages table

- unable to create relationship 'FK_Messages_UserId'.

The ALTER TABLE statement conflicted with the FOREIGN KEY constraint 'FK_Messages_UserId'. The conflict occurred in database 'XXXX', table 'dbo.Users', column 'UserId'.

I've done several other similar relationships without incident. But this one (and one or two others) refuse to work. I'm a bit of newbie with these rascals, so that doesnt help much... Any ideas what this things trying to tell me? Thanks! -- Curt

You might already have entries in your child table which have no parent entry in the parent table.

HTH, Jens K. Suessmeyer.

http://www.sqlserver2005.de|||

Hi Jens... Thanks for the reply. You threw me a little at first on your use of "parent" and "child", but yeah you nailed it. To try and tie those terms to the tables in my original post, I had some records in Messages (child) that referenced a primary key that did not exist in Users (parent). Geez, these FKs really help us keep a clean house, dont they... Thanks again!! Curt