Why conditional value lists so labor intensive?

[Jason Goldsmith]

I made a small conditional value list to teach myself the concept. For my needs, I would have approximately a dozen conditional value lists that would regularly change. It seems like a aweful amount of work to create something that is admittedly very useful. I wish updating conditional value lists was as easy as updating normal value lists. Any chance Filemaker 7 might include something like this?

Is there any work around that someone could suggest. I suppose if the first "value list" was a series of buttons (say, Products) that allowed the user to go to one of series of custom layouts (Companies which produce that product) and then onto a third set of layouts (Specific Models produced by that company). This would create an expanding branching pattern of layouts. Could the fields in the third tier (Specific Models) be the same in all third tier layouts, just with different value lists? Then I could make a label (calculation field) which combines all the third tier field entries and have a complete list of what each customer purchased.

My specific needs are an easy way to update value lists that function in a conditional fasion, and the ability to produce labels with a calculation field that combines third tier entries (Specific Models selected). Of course, the Specific Models for a given customer would be selected across several records. These could be combined with a portal using a self-relationship. Alternatively, I've developed a script to combine common field entries across multiple records to create a label, which is my prefered outcome for printing purposes.

I greatly appreciate any thoughts/advice!

[Ugo DI LUCA]

Hmm...

A conditional value list is based on relational datas. By definition, compared to custom Value-List, it gets updated as soon as records are added in the related file.

I'm not sure what really your goal is, but you can even select muliple "starting" values, by using a field (calc, global or text) including carriage return as separators....

I understood nothing though about your label thing, so may be I'm just overlooking some obvious problems you're facing...

[Jim McKee]

Hi Jason ...

If your value lists are based on fields, they are self-updating. There is no maintenance required. Enter a new value into the field, and the Value List using that field is updated.

If your conditional value lists are properly set-up with relationships between key-fields, they will dynamically update whenever a new value is entered into the key field on the right side of the relationship that controls the conditional value list. Again, there is no maintenance required.

Like Ugo, I didn't understand exactly what you are trying to accomplish with the label thing. Are you trying to print the equivalent of line items from an invoice onto the label, but only showing the product (model) name?