Gang-

I've checked the postings and don't see a query quite similar enough to mine to help with my problem. If I've missed a duplicate posting, please forgive my redundancy.

I have a Billing record that has two related fields (billing rate A, billing rate : that are successfully retrieved through a Client ID relationship with the Client record. (One enters two possible billing rates when defining a client.)

What I would like to do now is create a value list (to access via menu, radio button, whatever) from which the user selects a billing rate to employ in calculting a billable amount. Ideally, the value list would contain "billing rate A," "billing rate B," and "Other" for the user to enter a custom billing rate.

It's clear to me how I would populate a value list with multiple values from a single field across a set of records, but it's not clear how I would populate a value list with two fields from one record.

Any suggestions?

Have you considered using a lookup to supply the billing rate? If necessary the rate can be manually overridden. You don't need a value list for lookups and the data is autoentered.

If I understand correctly, the problem with a lookup is that I must also be able to provide the user with a choice between the two billing rates. In short, the db must 1) retrieve billing rate A from a related client record to show the user, 2) retrieve billing rate B from the same related record to show the user, 3) give the user a choice between using billing rate A or billing rate B or manually entering their own billing rate.

I'm having difficulty implementing this without it being clumsy. I'd like to show them the two available rates and allow them to choose one (or none), all in the same pop-up/radio button field.

I assumed that billing rates were customer dependent. You want the user to be able to choose a billing rate and even set a new rate. I assume you have different billing ratres for different tasks. Make a rate table with Task ID, Rate A, Rate B & Other. Use this as the source for the value list using Task ID as the key in the relationship.

Here's what I was going to say:

Make a value list from A and a value list from B. Then create a calc field:

AB=ValueListItems ( Get(FileName) ; "A") & "

I had a similar occurance with a calculated field to be used as a value list, but I had to turn on indexing for the list to populate.

My calc value was simply FirstName & "" & LastName

So I wonder, if there are any conditions tht need to be met for value lists to be populated?