Mitchell Design

Over the past year, I've been honing my FMP skills creating a solution that tracks the individual components of educational product under development for my employer. The solution tracks as Master Item (the complete, built product as sold) and Component (everything that makes up said Master Item), with components relating back to the master via a generated serial number. The real "tracking" happens on the component level, with the master item acting as a way for all related info to be able to be changed at one time when needed. Works great, with no problems. In fact, I've done such a wonderful job with it, the Powers That Be want to be able to start tracking other art, print and odd jobs not related to development in the same manner. Here's where I hit the wall... Several departments will be working with both developmental and non-developmental records. Some won't. Some parts of the data would be similar, some won't. Part of me wants to make a nearly identical solution (duplicated & trimmed down) for tracking the non-developmental stuff away from the product and be done with it. But then again, the other part of me says I really should put it all together in one place so the departments who do work with both types of data don't need to jump between solutions to get their work done. Add to that, the prospect of trying to get data from two different tables together on one printed report makes me nervous. I know I could do it, but I fear it would be a kludge somehow (keeping in mind, not all of the data is identical). And, could I be creating double work for myself when a "feature" is requested for one solution that needs to be in the other for consistency sake? I've gone back & forth with this for a good two weeks now, and my deadline is fast approaching. Any advice for a neophyte FMP developer? Many thanks in advance.

Bob - Thanks for the link. You're right, it's a bit warped, but quite useful none the less. I will add it to my arsenal for later use. Peter - I was actually able to get your method to do what I needed with a little tweaking. It's a bit kludgey, but it does get the job done reliably. Once I have an opportunity to sort it all out & document it, I'll post the details. I owe you a big one! That was truly worth a star. Again, many thanks to the masters. My users are once again happy... And so am I. [ February 25, 2002, 11:40 AM: Message edited by: Jim Mitchell ]

Help from all angles, I love it! quote: But here's a crazy idea -- how about just putting a copy of the field in its final formatted state next to the entry field, or on another layout, whatever, and the user can just click a button and "preview" how it will look? Fitch - Thanks for the "crazy suggestion", but if it were really just that easy, that's what I would have done. The group of users that will be posting the data for that field are "artsy visionaries" who have minimal technical savvy with monitors usually set to 640 x 480. I just don't have the real estate for that luxury... Chuck was kind enough to email me something the other night that gets me going, though it does need some work. Once I can get it to do what I need reliably, then I'll post a follow up here. quote: <Hint: it's totally warped!> Bob - I'm open to anything that may solve my problem, "warped" (I assume that's a play on "total wraps"?) or not. I'd love to hear what you have to share, either here or via email. Again, thanks for everyone's input. You (again) got me back on track.

quote: If that's the case, the Vaughan's solution is the right one for you. Thanks for your input Chuck, and I do understand what you are saying, but that's not what I'm looking for... Let's say you have a field on your layout that's roughly 25 characters wide and 10 lines tall. Without any <cr>, you should be able to get nearly 250 characters in the field, give or take. I could just set the validation to ">250" and call it a day. My problem is, what if the user places a <cr> at the 10th character of the 5th line to start a new line of text. That would allow them to enter 11 lines of text with 14 characters on the "hidden" line before the validation would kick in, thus cutting of some of the printable description. I need a way to compensate for the <cr> and missing 14 characters on that line and apply them towards my total count of 250. I think Vaughan's follow up post is pretty much on the nose. I am just trying to be thorough before I return to the user who requested the "feature" and laugh in their, err, tell them it's a no go. Thanks for your help, gents!

Thanks for the input Vaughan, but not quite what I need. I don't want to remove the <cr> from the input, rather, I need to account for them. Let's say user "A" enters a 3 or 4 word feature/description, then a <cr>, plugs in another 4 or 5 words, another <cr> & continues as such making 10 short lines in the field. Then there's user "B" who likes to be very wordy in their descriptions. The first feature/description they type wraps 3 times in the field before they finally enter a <cr>, then they do another line in the same fashion, and then another... The goal is that the last line of text falls in the same place on the printed form for both users without anything being truncated in the field. I'd like to somehow count the typed characters on the left side of the <cr>, subtract that from the known field width and be able to work some kind of tally that says a limit has finally been reached, even though in truth, it may not have. Alternately, I could try to teach users that "this is just about all the space you have...". But, that may even be harder than the validation I'm looking for... Thanks!

Hoping the guru's can help with this one... I'm trying to create a validation that will limit the amount of text (word/characters) in a description field. No problem, I can do that one. My hang up is when the user adds a " " and starts a new line (yes, it has to be able to happen). How can I take into account for the remainder of characters on a line that would otherwise be there if there were no " "? The field is also multi-lined, so it could contain several hard returns that need to be accounted for. I envision making some sort of calculation that totals to a set amount then the description field validates against that number. What's that? I think I can already hear the chuckles... Hope this makes some sense to someone somehow. Thanks in advance.

That did the trick. Just what I was looking for. Thanks a bunch, Bridge! BTW, my scenario calls for the second version of your solution with different totals of related. Should have mentioned that originally... [ February 04, 2002, 11:58 AM: Message edited by: Jim Mitchell ]

Have 2 tables, Main and Component with records related via serial number. I need to find a way to raise a flag in Main when all related records in Component have the same condition met. i.e. - when the "completed" field for all 3 components related to the master say "yes" a field in master automatically says "yes" too. Thanks in advance.

My solution, served by Server 5.0, is set up to auto assign a new serial on record creation at the click of a button (i.e. "P4096"). I've had two instances today of the same user on a Windows machine being able to produce just a "P" with no numbers in the field. The number sequence is used since a gap between numbers shows up (P4096 | P | P4098). I'm baffled. Has anyone run across this before? Could this be a, I hate to say, "bug" of working in a served environment with multiple users creating records? I've searched the forums, but found nothing similar. Thanks in advance. [ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: Jim Mitchell ]

Dan, Thanks for the reply & sorry to take so long to get back to you. You know how the holidays can be. Your advice was a great starting point, but I had some troubles with the whole loop thing. In fact, I was trying to avoid it altogether, since I had never found loops very reliable ... until today. I'd never considered using a global as a loop counter until I saw the "Go to record by field value" option. (duh) Here's the solution I came up with... In my Master Item.fp5 db: Show All Records Omit Record Show Omitted Duplicate Record/Request - had to do this here to get the new serial assigned Set Field ("global_serial", "serial") Omit Record - This is to go back to the original record Go to Related Record (Show, "Component") Perform Script (Sub-scripts, External: "Component.fp5") In my Component.fp5 db: Created 2 new fields: loopCount & recordCount Go to Record/Request/Page (First) - just to be safe Set Field ("loopCount","1") Set Field ("recordCount", "Status(CurrentFoundCount)") Loop Duplicate Record/Request Set Field ("serial","CompToMaster::global_serial") Omit Record Set Field ("loopCount", "loopCount+1") Go to Record/Request/Page ("loopCount") Exit Loop If ("loopCount = recordCount + 1") - wouldn't work otherwise End Loop Show Omitted Go to Record/Request/Page (Last) Go to Related Record (Show, "CompToMaster") Set Field ["CompToMaster::global_serial",

I too ran into this and for the life of me couldn't figure out what was going on, until I deleted the "new updated files" and moved the ".old" files back to where they came from, launched the updater again and watched to see where it konked out. Short story is that it turns out the updater was trying to replace a plug-in in my FM Developer package instead of the FMP plug-ins, as, being a tidy Mac user, I kept them together in the same folder. There was something with the date or file version that stopped the update. I'm sorry, I can't remember which file it is though... Once I moved the Dev folder to my desktop and ran the updater again, everything worked just fine. HTH somehow... Jim Mitchell mitchelldesign@mac.com

Hi all, My first post. Have already gleened much from the forums. Many thanks to all the masters. Here's my One to Many "dilema"... I have 2 dbs - "Master Item" (One) and "Component" (Many). "MI" has a unique serial number assigned to each new record. Through a script between "MI" & "C", a user increments a "component number" field by one for each new component created (this number is held in the Master Item record), creates a new record in "C" that sets the serial number from one global, and sets the new component number from another global. The two are read into "C" and the relationship is made (i.e. - P4100-1) Here's the fun... From "MI", I need to be able to let my users, at *only* the click of a button, duplicate the current "MI" record and related "C" records. The duplicate assigns a new serial number to the "MI" record, but how do I duplicate the related records in "C" and get my new serial number into the necessary field to make the relationship to the new Master record work? This is all to save tremendous amounts of data entry as many items can carry duplicate information. I'm sure there is a very simple solution to this, but just can't seem to find it yet. Many thanks in advance for any help. Jim Mitchell mitchelldesign@mac.com [ December 21, 2001: Message edited by: Jim Mitchell ]