Prospect to Client data

[JoeyTheLemur]

Hi all, thanks in advance for any help.

Using FMP 5 on a Mac (OS 9), I am working on a system to track a company's business data, everything from time and cost entry for their employees to billing to their sales and client data. The latest stumbling block for me is the sales and client data.

The company I am working for would like to have the following process through their sales channel: Salespeople enter new prospect companies & enter all activity with those prospects as line items in a portal (activity data is a separate file called Activity Line Items). Their current system has separate files for client data(Client DB) and prospect data (Sales DB). Currently they are storing lots of redundant data in both places (Address info, for example). I have the feeling that, for the new system, it would be better to have a generic file called "Company" that has basic info with a flag field that identifies it as to whether it is just a prospect or a client or whatever. That way, the Activity Line Items can stay related to a single record, especially when a Company moves from Prospect to Client (what the users want). What I am trying to avoid is making the user enter search criteria each time to narrow their work to just Clients or just Prospects when working in the Company file.

One assumption I have made (being new to FileMaker) is that FileMaker does not do searches based on a found set of records. In other words, I am working under the impression that I cannot have a simple script upon opening that will filter out one or the other, so the user works only with what they want (Prospects for salespeople or Clients for others). My experience (admittedly limited) tells me that each time the users would do a search again, it would search through the entire Company file, not just in the current found set. If I am wrong in this assumption or there is a way to do this, I would appreciate any direction.

Thanks!!

[andygaunt]

Version 6.x of FMPro has the ability to constrain or expand the current found set.

If you are using this version of FMPro then you can do this, otherwise takes some scripting.

[Ugo DI LUCA]

How can this be done Andy.

Is there security settings to allow only some users to use one relationship ?

Would also like to let some users access to a subset in my main Operators File (Customers, Vendors, Tax collector, Other Services).

[JoeyTheLemur]

Thanks Andy. I wasn't aware that FMP 6 had that ability.

As I am most likely stuck with version 5.0 for this app, can you describe how I might solve the issue using scripting?

Wayne

[SteveB]

Instead of doing a search, how about using 2 portals and relationships? You'd have a clients relationship and a prospects relationship and no scripting.

[Ugo DI LUCA]

So you suggest that we allow entry to a set of users for some layouts with portals showing relationships Contacts:Prospect::Contacts:Prospects.

Worj-king only with portals, not table nor lists, except for printings

That seems to be a good solution...

That would quite answer one of my other post. Can we get really rid of lists and tables ? What are the risks. As we can sort a portal, filter it to show specific records related, I wondered if it wasn't more efficient to work within portals only.

That would also simplify the interface.

[SteveB]

The more I work with Filemaker, the more I've moved to relationships and portals. I recently changed my solution from scripted finds to portals which allowed me to simply the user experience and get rid of a bunch of more complicated scripts. The only downside is that you really can't print from the portals. They also make the solution seem faster to the users (which it probably is because there are no finds to execute).