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At its heart UR is a user-interface for the mySQL relational database. And while it is not required to know this, or to know anything about relational database concepts to get up and running in UR, once you start to move beyond the surface an understanding of these concepts does become helpful. I don't see how Kinook can possibly include a satisfactory introduction to these concepts in a help file for this program.
In this particular case, there were four different people working to understand and resolve the problem presented. This post currently stands at (300) views, which tells me that someone beyond the handful of participants may benefit from this discussion.
As was mentioned by $Bill, the issue presented is a common quandry faced when developing a database structure, namely how best to deal with a one-to-many relationship. Apparently there are three differnt avenues available to resolve this quandry:
_ use of the Auto-complete attribute option to build the drop-down pick list. Here you build compound values (the many) which can be stored in a single Attribute (the one), where a Search on any one value will reveal the many places it is assigned.
_use of the Data Explorer to build an internal table of values (the Tags branch) and the Alt-L interface to assign/create the one-to-many relationship. This relationship can be viewed on the TAGS side thru the Data Explorer, or on the Item side thru the Ctrl-6 Parents Pane.
_use of Keywords, which is a variation on the previous option.
_not mentioned was use of the Logical data type, where you bring "the many" choices into "the one" record.
Each of these avenues have an upside and a downside, which avenue is chosen will depend on the size of the list of values you wish to assign.
Where is the best place for a discussion such as this, I don't know. I will say that I benefited greatly from the time when software publishers made available extensive printed documentation, with in-depth discussions of database concepts and numerous "for examples", and still required an active user forum for further support.
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