Sub Summary reports and relationships

[Eco Heat Renewables]

Hi 

I have been struggling for days with this.  I am trying to stop using Word to produce quotes and contracts and enter the data once in filemaker then I can produce everything with a click of a button and not have to reenter things over again. 

I am sure that the problem is my understanding of relationships but the relationship seems to work ok until I attempt to build a subsummary report

I hope you can view a screen capture I make which I hope explains 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wmgb08oxi8l8utq/capture-1.mp4?dl=0

[Steve Martino]

I think you want your layout based on weeks, sorted by week name.  Then add fields for projects and customer.

Much like an Invoice solutions where you base your reports on line items, and have fields usually merge fields for customer.

Your boiler plate contract could be in a table or global table of contracts that you could lookup (or by calculation), much like when you look up and add a line item to the invoice.  Then you can take the boilerplate, modify it, and save it into a container in your projects table, where you would keep contracts-change orders, additional work, etc.

It's quite an involved database.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Steve Martino

[Eco Heat Renewables]

Hi Steve 

 

Sorry for the very long gap in my reply.  The problem with developing my database is that I also run two businesses so it always takes a back seat.  

Anyway - your suggestion was correct however it still did not work immediately as I discovered a "schoolboy error" in my relationship but once resolved my report works as expected. 

My next challenge ii to try to make Filemaker behave like a word processor to produce quotes and contracts.  The problem is that the amount of text and items are never the same - one contract may have a job description which is one paragraph and then 10 items,  while the next could have a job description of 3-4 pages and 50+ items.  Ideally I would like to have the same neat layout that I can achieve with a word doc,  but that seems difficult.  I will need to do some more investigation 

Thanks for your help 

[Steve Martino]

You can do it a few ways.  One way is to do it in Word, copy/paste into a Filemaker field, and/or save the doc as a container (pdf).

The other is to make a few layouts that are templates.  Using the 'slide up' feature you can make them as long or as short as you want.  I do this with customers where I made a table to send letters/emails/texts.  After I build the body of the text, select the appropriate template, print/email letter, save a copy of the letter as PDF in a container.  Mine is kinda clunky, as I am rebuilding in 15 (from 12) and plan to polish this part of the db with popovers and sliders.

But their is an example of this floating around.  If I find it I'll edit my post.

Edit:

This may help:http://fmdl.filemaker.com/MISC/PDF/guide_diy_office.pdf

Edited January 22, 2017 by Steve Martino
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