Handling Crosstab like Data

Question

I have a situation where I need to keep track of Data that looks like a crosstab report.
ie let us say there are 2-6 kinda close sets of data
like the eg. below. the #of columns could be 3 -6 variable
depending on the set. The time interval could vary depending on the set.
unit 1 apple banana orange Unt2 appl pear grape melon
7:00 18 20 25 7:00 21 27 19 34
8:00 12 56 17 9:00 26 51 12 17
9:00 ................ 11:00 28 72 09 55
there are more records for the next day and so on.
There earlier method of 'storing' this data was crude just have as many fields in a table as there are cells and 1 record per day.
My method is to have (unit#,day, time,fruit_id, value) in my table and have tons of records.
I can produce output that looks like the cross tabs above using reports from my new table,but how to organize the form?
since each record now is too small, it will mean many saves.
I could have a block with many lines and lovs for unit,fruit_id and time and hit one save but it may not be intuitive.
Or I can have a non db table block that looks like the cross tab grid, and then do manipulation to create many records that I want.
eg> canvas_1 - unit1
time apple orange banana
7 1 3 8
9:00 2 8 7
then create 6 records internally.
Which way should I organize the form?

Answer 1

You can further normalise observation into two or even three as shown below.
e.g
observation
(observation_id,observation_name,observation_type)
observation_details
(observation_id, observation_detail_id,patient_id,obervation_date,observation_notes)
observation_results
(observation_detail_id,observation_result_id,resultA,resultB,resultC,resultETC,result_status,result_notes)
You can now be able to have the same observation and stored different results as many times as possible (including incorrect ones). Use the Status as a key to select the valid result)
NOTE: This is just a personal sample out of my head which you can expand or reduce as much as you can. It does not represent the design you MUST use.