How do you handle data table dependencies in your projects?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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I am trying to get an idea how other devs do things. How do you manage situations like this one:
Imagine I have a data table Monster Stats (Designer can create new monster types here)

Key,  Power Toughness
Goblin 100 100
Orc    200 200

Then I have an ItemTable where designers can configure a bonus vs monster type. I want to be only able to enter valid monster types in this field.

My ideas so far:

  1. Make ItemTable refer to a data table row in MonsterStats. I am leaning towards this solution but I also find it inelegant since I don’t care about the entire row only the type (i.e. the FName).

  2. Have an additional MonsterType data table which contains only the valid FNames (Goblin, Orc etc). Use these FNames as the keys to the MonstarStats table and the fields of the ItemTable. This would be my solution outside unreal (i.e. if using a proper database) but it doesn’t seem to be the Unreal way of doing things (please let me know if this should work so that I can try again :)).