Kind of new at this.

I've got three DBs I want to create for IT asset management.

DB1 Hardware - Has user data, serial number, and the standard software image that is ghosted on to the machine.

DB2 Software Image - This database has the actual software contained on the software image mentioned in the previous DB. The software fields are simply radio buttons, so whoever sets up a new image can just click them on or off.

DB3 Software Database - This is the one that tells me what software is set on what machine. I want to track software by serial number since a user can have more than one machine. It looks a lot like the image record design, but also looks up the user name and image fields from the hardware database.

What I can't seem to do is get the software list from the image DB. As far as I can tell, you can't create relationships with a lookup fields (image field in the software database) and you can't get them to carry over to another database via a different relationship.

Sorry. Should have mentioned I'm on Filemaker 6.

Not sure I followed your database design, but I think I know what your question is.

In generic terms, you have relationship R1 defined by matching field X1 in DB1 to X2 in DB2. All is well. But now you want to define a relationship R2 from DB1 to DB3, by matching field Y2 in the matching record of DB2 to a field Y3 in DB3. Did I get the problem statement right?

To do that, you need to define a calculation field Y1 in DB1 that is simply R1::Y2. Then define your relationship R2 using that calculation field Y1 to match Y3. Make sense?

HTH.