Fredrik

Hi, and I'm sorry that I haven't been able to give a reply sooner. Well, it's more likely that I'm missing something I suspect. I guess I didn't quite understand your example in regards to my problem for some simple reasons that may or may not be relevant. You mentioned: And this confused me since I my problem didn't include either of these two: a find or a report. I wanted a field to put on my list layout and not a report. The field would be placed in a lower corner of the layout and would be showing always regardless of how many records the list was showing or how they were sorted or in which found sets. And as Vaughan suggested a Summery field solved my problem. So if what you explained can do this in a more efficient way than a summary field that would be great. But could you please explain in more detail how I could do it then?

Thanks for the replies guys! And Vaughan; your explanation was very clarifying. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain such elementary subjects to a newbie:-)

Thank you very much for your speedy reply:-) This certainly works the way I wanted. I'm just a beginner and haven't really explored the summery fields yet. Thanks for enlightening me:-) And I'm just wondering if there is absolutely no other way of showing this information that is more efficient?

Hi! On a layout in browse mode I have added merge fields (based on an auto enter timestamp fields) to show creation and modification date/time for each record. That was very easy to do. But then I wanted to add something similar to my list layout, and I can't figure out how to do it. I would like to create a calculation field to show the oldest creation date (the oldest record) and one for the newest creation date (the most newly created record) for the found set in the list. I hope someone can help me with this:-)

Thanks for the events example LaRetta! I'm really beginning to get a greater understanding of table occurrences and the relationships among them. And I think this topic is nearing it's end now. Thank you all for helping me out with my elementary problems - I truly appreciate it:-)

This was just something that I tried to get my DB to work based on your demo, but it didn't work for me so I have abandoned this approach. I have taken a closer look now and I discovered that I could solve my problem by adding a Roles table and doing some sorting in my portals. So that worked just great! But I have one more problem with my DB that I'm not quite sure how to solve and that I hope you could help me with. And that is the events table. I'm not sure if I need a join table for it or not? What I want to do is enter a publication date on my texts layout while filling in the other information about a text. And I am thinking about the scenario when a text has more that one author and therefore a publication event is tied to them all. And also I want to fill in date of birth and death on the peoples layout. And what if I want to add an event for a country - like Independence Day or something?

I have not created a join table between People and Articles - that is still a direct relationship, but the match field doesn't work with the calculation in your example. I have created a join table between Articles and Author, and another one between Articles and Narrator. It is possible that there is no way of getting this to work. but I at least wanted to make that clear, and it would have been such a simple and elegant solution. I will definitely take closer look at your DB tomorrow. And hopefully I will figure it out. Thanks again, and good night:-)

Sorry, I should have made my problem more clear. Everything with the join tables are working just fine. My problem is connecting the Persons TO to the Articles so that I can base a layout on the Persons TO and get the right information in the portals there.

First of all I would like to thank you for all the help I have gotten here. I'm really getting somewhere now;-) This is a great forum! But of course I have some more questions: I have been trying to implement your model for my database and I'm getting some good results. But I have one problem with the match field that you called cPeopleIDs. I have created two join tables that go between Authors and Narrators. A consequence of this is that the fields AuthorID and NarratorID are in the join tables and therefore become related fields in the cPeopleIDs calculation. This causes the field cPeopleIDs to be unstorable and not indexed. And therefore it doesn't work as a match field (I think). I would really like a solution for this, but I frankly have no idea what to do! Can I create another match field or is there another workaround? I'm interested to know what you think is a better way to do this.

Thank you very much for the demo file. It has absolutely helped my understanding of my problem. But what if I want a many-to-many relationship. If I want an Article to have many authors and/or many narrators? Do I need just one join table or more? Or do I just need different TO's of a join table? And last but not least: Do I need a join table between all three TO's of the People table and Article table or just between the Articles and People, or just between Articles and Authors and Narrators? I hope that wasn't explained in a to confusing way :confused:

Well I don't know if that would be of much help since it's quite chaotic and all most every name for fields, tables, TO's, scripts and so on are in Norwegian.

I'm sorry to bother you more with this, but I can't get it to work. I think I might have to use different TO's with different matchings in the relationships but I don't have enough understanding of this to pull it off. As I tried to explain in the above post I would very much like to have authors and narrators in different fields with their respective labels on my layout Texts/Books layout. And I would like to have the possibility to have a person be both author and narrator on the same book and for different books. And on a People layout I would like to have two different portals showing the books the person has authored and narrated. So if someone could help me with an example file or a detailed explanation about which fields (Flag fields, Type fields or what ever) I would need in which tables and how many TO's and their relationships to the join table I would be very grateful.

First of all I would like to thank you people for helping a newbie such as myself with my elementary problems:-) I'm trying to get the People table to work with my Texts table but there are some problems. Now that I have consolidated Authors and narrators into a People table I want to put fields on my Texts layout for entering author and narrator. I have also created a join table where I have added a field called Role. I got an author field working by using a single row portal with a pop-up menu field with the foreign key for people ID and a value list with the names from People. I set it so that when I add an author a record is created in the join table, and a script trigger on modify to set the role to author. This worked very well. But the trouble is when I try to the same on a narrator field I just get the same record entered on the author. I understand that I could use just one portal and add the role field to it for creating both authors and narrators, but I would really like to have to fields on my layout with their own labels.

Thanks for the quick reply eos and LaRetta! Making one 'people' table sounds like a good idea and might solve my problems if I can get some sorting with portals to work:-) My idea with the countries table is to specify the nationality of the different people. And I was thinking that it would be enough with one country per person. But maybe I should just put a join table there too so if I ever want to specify more than one country per person I could do that too. So I can probably get this working. But I have another problem (that is similar to the first one I had but not possible to solve in the same way) too that you maybe can help me with: I have been wanting to create a table for Years. My thought was that every record in this table would be a year, e.g. 1980 or 2012, and that each record would contain some information about historical events that took place that year and so on. So far so good, but I would also like relate this to both books and people for fields like when the book was originally published and year of birth and death for people. And then I would like to have portals in the years layout showing related records.

Hi! I'm trying to make a database to manage information on books, authors and narrators of audiobooks. These three entities have their own tables and I also have a table for countries. I want to assign a country to each author and narrator, and in a layout based on the countries table I want to show related records from authors in one portal and narrators in another one. I have tried to make this work with different types of table occurences and join tables but I can't get it right. Any help would be greatly appreciated:-)