I am trying to get my solution to make a pick-up list. I have the following:

I have 100 customers that are going to be picked up one morning for doing an adventure trip.

I have 17 cars in the company

I have name and pick-up point for all customer in my solution.

I now want to make a pick-up list for each car, so 17 lists. However, if I i.e. have Mr. Spaghetti and Mrs. Spaghetti on one pick-up place I do not want to send to cars to this place.

So in other words I would like to make 17 lists and do not break couple a part and only one car to each pick-up points unless there are more then 6 at that place. (6 customer in one car)

Anybody have an id

One crazy idea:

You could create a self-join relationship based on the address field. Then, by looking at a portal, you can tell if there is another person to pick up at the identical address.

The problem here is that you are asking a computer to make a value judgment. The programming for this is extremely complex, and requires far more than a database application could normally manage. Basically, you're trying to determine the most efficient way of picking up people and dropping them off, and any software that can manage that is going to cost a lot more than Filemaker.

You can create parameters that the computer can check (such as whether anyone else is being picked up at the same address), and use this information to help you make the judgment, but the computer can't make the judgment for you.

Of course, I could be wrong.

First you don't need 17 value list but only one, conditional value list based on pick point self relationship:

To check how many cars you'll need for one pick point use:

Case(count(PickPointSelfRel::customerID),Int((count(PickPointSelfRel::customerID)/6)+.5),0)

Dj

Yeh, you are right but I was thinking of a way to make a simple suggestion to the user and then let the user review and manually change what the computer cannot see.

I made one simple scrip that just entered car number to every customer will the pick-up location was sorted from north to south. It works, but the mistakes are many and I would like to reduce the errors by checking the current place with the next place and so on.

Or, just tell the users NO WAY can not be done!!!!

Dj

That works fine, I can calculate the amount of cars needed. But I need to assign a car to each customer.

I have two dbs:

1. Cars

2. Customers.

Since different cars can have different amount of customer I need to hold data of cars.

More id

Hi,

As usual, I would make it more complicated but...

cars.fp5

pickUp Point.fp5

customer.fp5

customerToPickUpPoint.fp5

carsToPickUpPoint.fp5

I'll use a set of Selfjoins also

Selfjoin on Names to match family members

Seljoin on Pick-up to identify the number of persons on each Pick-up Points

A calculation the number of Pick-up Points and number of cars (if a car should go to several PickUp Points).

The whole thing would depend on the way your records are entered.

- entering Customers Preferencies one at a time

- grouping Customers Preferencies, then use a script.

Interresting Exercice though...

Hi Bert,

Forget about my last post.

As I had some time left at lunch time (no spaghetti today), I had a second look at your problem.

If I were to manage this kind of pick-up on a regular basis, use a Map of the Town/District/Region/Country . Divinding it into 36 square parts with records from A1 to A6, B1, B2, ....F6) and create a Map.fp5 db using these records.

In the Customer.fp5, I'll ask for a 3 choice Multikey field (my choice 1, my choice 2, my choice3) using these 36 records as a startpoint.

Apart for the Selfjoin on Adress (or Name & Adress), there could be 50 persons in A1 and the other 50 splitted in the other 35 records. That is were the problem rises....

- How do you determine the Pick-up place ? (where ? why ? On which parameters ?)

- When do you determine the Pick-up place ? (when processing each customer, when the 100 customers entries and choices are processed ?)

Ugo

You can see from me posts that I am staying in Phuket Thailand and this is one of the biggest tourist destinations in this part of the world. You wrote

Hi Bert,

What about Air Conditioning on Elefants

As I understand, all Pick up points are Hotels and each Hotel have a route.

I would definitely use a "Line Item" here with Files :

Cars.fp5

Customer.fp5

Hotels.fp5

Pick-up "Order".fp5

Route.fp5

This Line would have

Customer (linked to Customer.fp5)

Nber of passengers (By calculation on self-join or if you don't need to hold specifics data for Customer, enter Mr and Mrs SPAGHETTI, Family SPAGHETTI,...in Customer.fp5)

Site Visit_ID choosen

Hotel

Route (by lookup)

Date

I would do the set-up with Portals using this Line Item, filtered by route, using Total(LineItem::Number of passengers) to identify the number of passengers per Pick-up Order :

- setting 6 as a max passenger for each Pick-up Order with your formaer example

- setting the max passengers number using reference to the Car Number (Car.fp5 should have Nb of passengers)

Now you could use a selfjoin portal on day to list all 51 or more Pick-up Orders.

You could use a trick in the line-items to flag all cars availables (excluding those where Total Passengers = Car Capabily).

Am I confusing you ?

I am not confused it