Complex Relationship Help

April 9, 200421 yr

For my business, I have a lot of people who refer clients to me for credit assistance. When a person signs up, we note who referred them.

I want to be able to look at any client, and not only see who referred them, I want to know about the people who referred before them.

Example, John is a Loan officer, and refers Bob. Bob then refers Chris.

I want to be able to look at Chris, and see Bob, and John, and some details about them. Since all of our clients are asked to refer business, this would have to be some kind of relationship to show the previous 2 referers in the line. Where it gets complicated is, if the person who referred them is not a client of ours, they are kept in a seperate database called "Agents" I've got to be able to see data from both places at the same time.

Any suggestions?

Sorry for the complicated explanation.

Thanks in advance

FileMaker Version: Dev 6

Platform: Windows XP

April 9, 200421 yr

Hi,

True this is a complex relationship. At first, I would see it as a recursive relationship, so check this thread

HTH

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Mac OS 9

April 9, 200421 yr

Hi,

I took a few minutes to adapt a file I posted a few months ago about Multi-Levels relationships.

The original was building a tree from the Main parent to the Last, while in your Case, you'd go backwards into the tree.

The Ids are kept stored in either a Multiline Key and a MultiKey so that you can easily use these keys lately to link and see all related referers.

In my opinion, you'd better use only one Contacts file and classify your contacts as either Customers or Agents.

If not, at least use an external file with all of them, so that you can lately grab the ID and go back to either the Customer file or the Agents file second which category the record belong to.

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Mac OS 9

MulltiLevelsRef.fp5.zip