Composite Primary Keys

[Iainmck]

Hi

Can anyone confirm if filemaker(6) supports composite key relationships and if so how these are created.

Thanks

Iain

[Lee Smith]

Try doing a search for MultiKey and you will find a ton of treads, even a couple of demo and tip files.

Lee

[LaRetta]

Hi Iain,

You can create composite primary keys by creating concatenated (text) calculations.

The calculation for your related db would need to be STORED and would look something like:

Field1 & "

[BobWeaver]

Iain may be asking about a compound key rather than a multi-key. Eg., find related records that match both a customer ID and a certain date. In this case you would create a calculated field:

CompoundKey = CustomerID & Date

and have a similar foreign key field set up in the related file.

[LaRetta]

Hi Bob,

I was unclear on what he meant, so I tried to include concetanated and also multikey (into one) to cover him either way.

And that's why I asked to know the fields and data types. Lee's post threw me off!! Yeah! That's it!

Seriously now Bob ... Does a composite (or compound) always consist of a date? Can you provide your definition of them? Knowing what these phrases mean is more important to me than the embarrassment of asking.

I track this stuff in a db (guess which one)!! Yep, Paradox (smile).

LaRetta

[BobWeaver]

Well, terminology seems to be quite variable. That's why I wasn't sure what Iain wanted. I think composite means compound, but we tend to use the term "compound" more frequently in this forum. As to which is more correct, I dunno.

As for a compound key always containing a date, no. I just used Date as an example. I've used compound keys that are concatenations of as many as five fields without any of them being a date.

However, Multikey (in Filemaker context anyway) pretty much always refers to multiple items separated by a paragraph mark (carriage return) that relates to multiple records.

[Iainmck]

Thanks all, it was info on compound keys I was after. The difference in terminology explains why I was struggling to find any mention of them in the forum.

Iain