Pop Up List Trouble

[Satty]

I have a basic understanding of filemaker and was told this forum is the best to recieve help from.

We hav a saleperson field with a list of collegues in there and this saves fine but when you change the saleperson as he or she has left then this in turn changes to the new collegues name as they have taken over. We need help so we can keep previous booking with saleperson that made it as historic records and not being changed by adding the new collegues name in. Any suggestions? please help

Sat

[Mike D.]

I'm guessing that you are using either a calculation or a relationship to fill in the salesperson field. If you use an auto-entry lookup instead, the previous salesperson value does not change. When you create a new record, it pulls in the lookup value to fill in the salesperson field.

[CobaltSky]

Hi Sat,

A lookup, as suggested by mkd256, is certainly one way to resolve the problem.

However a conventional 'relational' solution would be to have a unique staff ID stored with each appointment, and a relationship to a staff file to pick up the mane and other details of the person in question.

The staff ID should be particular to a specific individual, and can be used to associate that individual with a job role as well as with appointments and other 'entities throughout the solution.

When a staff member leaves, you would then change the status of their record (eg to 'inactive'), but leave it in the staff file, so that all the historic references to it remain. A new staff member who replaces them may be flagged against the same role/positionID, but will acquire a new unique staff ID which will make it easy to distinguish them from previous incumbents of the position/role.

For some purposes, you might find it desirable to utilize a dual key which concatenates positionID and staffID, so that you can determine simultaneously that a particular reference relates to a specific person while they are undertaking a particular role.

This kind of process, often called 'data normalisation', separates information into its discreet categories - eg people as distinct from roles etc, and is the logic which underpins relational data models.

[Mike D.]

Hi Sat,

Sorry I just saw the email you sent me from 4/14. Do you still need help with this problem? To answer your email, yes if you decide to use the auto-entry method it would be for the salesperson field. However, I must agree with CobaltSky that using a related file to define the names of your staff would be the preferred method.

HTH, Mike