Create a Record & Populate Fields in another DB.

[jimkent]

Ok, this sounds easy so what am I doing wrong? I have a DB (Sponsors.fp5) that is populated with Names & Addresses. I am creating a DB of Donors who may or may not be in the sponsor DB. I have a Master DB that pulls from the sponsor db and populates the donor db (through a portal) with the people who donated. I have been able to use the Sponsor database as a list box to pull up names and lookup all the rest of thier info (Address kinda stuff).

Some donors are not in the Sponsor DB. So, I want to take the newly entered sponsors into the Donor DB for future use. How do I add a record from the Donor DB to the sponsor database and set all the appropriate fields. I hope I'm making sense. I should mention, the Master DB also pulls from the Student DB. (the Student can be sponsored by many donors).

[ESpringer]

Jim,

I'm not yet clear on the difference between "sponsoring" and "donating" in your message. Generally, it's a good practice, I think, to have only one "people" database where things like addresses are stored (except perhaps in cases where, as in "sponsors" and "students" there's likely to be zero overlap, though even then the fact that both sponsors and students have names, addresses and phones makes it efficient to store such people information all in one file; that way your templates for mailing labels or phone lists or whatever are available for any subset of people).

Then, if you have a "donations" database, each record refers to a particular act of donation (who, when, how much, for what, etc.) and all the background details about the "who" is not stored in the donations db, but actually just *displayed through* the relation to the people database using related fields on your layouts. If you have a "sponsorships" database, each record refers to a particular sponsorship relation (who-helper, whom-helped, how, when, comments). Again, the sponsorship database ideally doesn't store addresses and all. (Someone might be a sponsor in multiple ways, for example, and you don't want the address being in both places, right?)

I'm also not sure what the "master" db is doing... what kind of records does the Master DB contain?

If you want to solve a problem urgently without restructuring, I'd suggest that you probably want to use (1) a pop-up menu with a value list of existing sponsors whenever you enter a new donation record, from which you can hit "escape" to enter a name not on that list, and (2) related fields from the existing sponsors file instead of duplicate fields in your new database. Now, if you enable "creation of related records" in your definition of the relationship from new to old file, then you'll find that when the address fields *don't* immediately pop up with the related info (because there was no sponsor with that name already), then if you *do* type into those blank fields, viola! there's a new record over there in the other file...

[jimkent]

E Springer,

You've got it. The fourth paragraph is what I'm doing. The first to paragraphs are very similar to what I'm doing. Here is more explanation of my problem.

We have a fundraiser called "EagleFlight" which we have every year. It's where students get sponsored by the number of laps they do running around a track. The sponsor can be mom or dad, or someone they just ask.

What I'm trying to do is create a master db and call it EagleFlight DB. Then I'm trying to reproduce the one page sponsor sheet each child is required to fill out. It has the student name, the Donor name and Address, and the amount of money they will be pledging.

I have an existing student DB, and Parent DB that I copied and renamed as Sponsor.fp5. I was using my Master (EagleFlight) to create a form that would pull a student name (from a valuelist populated by the student.db). I then created a portal to a new DB called Donations.fp5. Each field there was using a lookup (within the portal) to find a parent name from the parent DB (I called that Sponsor.fp5). That part is working fine. And as you stated, if there is someone new the User merely hits Escape and puts in new info.

The problem I'm having is when the user hits Escape (just as you mentioned) to put in other names, I wanted the information the user put in to be populated into the sponsor db so the next time the User was typing in a name it would be there from the valuelist.

See, Grandma or Grandpa can sponsor more than one child (eagleflight form). It would be nice to have thier name in the value list after it was entered once. It is really simple and after reading your post, I'm afraid I'm going after it all wrong. Any advise would be greatly appricaiated.

Like I said, everything works except the valuelist is not populated with any newly added people. I guess that is why I'm wondering if I can write a record into the Sponsor DB from the Dontations db and if there is any relationship I can make to do that or a script. I'm trying the script route but having troubles with that as well.

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Jim