Fresh off the boat

[Monger]

Here is my , I guess simple problem, in even simpler terms:

Lets say farmer John wants to sell apples, oranges and pears on the Internet while keeping a accurate inventory count. So Johnny assigns numbers to each item. 1 for apple, 2 for pears...

He keeps all his line items in a table.

Then he realizes that he wants to sell baskets of mixed fruits as well. So now he is assigning basket ID's: A, B...

Next he wants to create a table that contains all his catalogue items, meaning that part of his inventory that Farmer J really wants to put up on his site. For his catalog he wants to create a separate table, since he wants to somehow build a relationship between his basket ID's and his fruit ID's that allows his to list a basket in the catalogue, pull in all the data for the fruits (weight, color...), and deduct the fruits in the basket from the inventory.

How is this done? I am guessing this is very basic but still, Famer John is not very smart.

I actually created a separate table for the catalogu and created a = relationship between two records. Then i created a portal on the catalog page for the different fruit ID's of the baskets since I will need those for my inventory count (reduction, that is). Then I imploded. When I tried to create another match field relationship the fruit ID's didn't show up in the portal anymore. Any other field I could also not relate to the other table, meaning the data from one table would not show up in the match field of the other table. Should I read the manual of FMP7?

Thanks,

Stephan

[bruceR]

Get "Advanced Filemaker 5.5 Techniques for Developers" by Moyer and Bower, it covers this exactly in a good example.

[BruceJ]

This is a point of sale solution if I understand correctly.

You will need to conceptualize it as three tables

1. Invoices (sales)

2. Line Items

3. Inventory

Simple enough at first, you have a calc field in the Inventory sum the qty of the realted line items for total sold...

Now, the tricky part is you've got some packages that are bundled items together that you want to represent as a single line item.

Of course a user could pick each item and built thier basket per line item... but you want to sell BasketA, BasketB, etc...

You can go a few directions on this one depending on how many and how complex the baskets are. Either way, you'll need a way to load the bundled basket description into the inventory file and then either script the baskets contents to add line items, or have a series of lookups and calcs and realtionships to alter the inventory items directly. I'd really need a piece of paper to draw that one one out rather than text.