Associating a contact with a membership number

[DreadDamsel]

Hi. I'm using FMPro 12 Advanced.

Creating a database for our community centre and I need to add a membership number to contacts - but not all of them.

I've created a separate table for Membership numbers (as not all contacts will have one, so serial numbers aren't appropriate).

Each membership has a number of details fields.

It's probably a REALLY logical and stupid problem I'm batting against - but I need to:

Select a contact>go to their details>add a membership number (go to a floating window layout, enter the details to the serial-number-derived membership) and have the details including the number show up in a tab on the contact's details layout.

I've created a relationship between my contacts file and my membership file via the Contact_ID>Contact_ID_fk and have played around with other relationships. 

I've also created a simple script from a button on the Contacts membership tab to go to the Membership Layout window and create a new record. But it keeps creating a new record in the Contacts, not Membership - even though the relationship only has to create new records in the memberships side.

I'm now running around in circles - please can anyone help me out here?????

[MikeKD]

Why can't the membership no be in the Contact table? Can members have more than one number / are membership numbers unique?

[comment]

A simple solution is to mark a contact as a member (for example, by entering a date in a MemberSince field) - and then use a calculation field to show their ContactID as their membership number. True, the membership numbers will not be consecutive - but I don't see why that should matter.

If for some reason you do need consecutive membership numbers, then mark contacts as members by creating a new related record in the Memberships table. This can be done very simply by defining the relationship to match on ContactID, and allow creation of related records on the Memberships side. With this is in place, a simple:

Set Field [ Memberships::ContactID ; Contacts::ContactID ]

called from a record in Contacts, will create a new Membership record and automatically link it to the current contact. The Membership number itself will be, of course, an auto-entered serial number field in the Memberships table.

[DreadDamsel]

Hi Mike - not all contacts are members, though those who are can only have a single membership number and class.

For example, a contact may be a government advisor - so not a member of the community house.

Also, a member may be either a voting or non-voting member - so different classes of membership.

We were also wanting membership numbers to be preceded by the joining month - so 052017-23 for example, this way we can easily keep track of when it's time to renew membership.

[comment]

11 minutes ago, DreadDamsel said:

We were also wanting membership numbers to be preceded by the joining month - so 052017-23 for example, this way we can easily keep track of when it's time to renew membership.

There is no good reason to add the joining month to the actual membership number. You can easily display the joining date (formatted as MMDDDD) alongside the membership number, if it helps. Although I believe a computer would be much better at keeping track of when it's time to renew a membership than a human eyeball.

[DreadDamsel]

Hm - what I suppose I could do is work on the basis that if a radio box is checked for "Member?", then the Contact_ID could show, otherwise it's left blank.

Reckon that would work?

[comment]

6 minutes ago, DreadDamsel said:

Reckon that would work?

It would. Clicking a button to populate a joining date field would work even better, IMHO.