Hi

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

Thanks

Iain

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

Lee

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 & "

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.

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

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.

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