Better way to generate an array of data?

[David Mosedale]

Hi,

I have been using FM 6 for a while with relatively simple stuff, but am convinced that one of my ways of doing things is ham-fisted!

I am using FM as a database for clinical data collected during a trial. We are collecting the same data on different days for each person. Up till now I have been using multiple different fields (e.g data1_time1, data1_time2 etc.). I am sure that within FM (using relationships? or repeating fields?) I could set this up more easily - especially as I have c. 30 data items over 17 time points. This means creating way too many fields!

Importantly, I will want to export the data for analysis so that each item of data is in a separate column in a tab-delimited file. Also, can I have a layout for each time point in the "fancy" solutions to this problem?

Can anyone help me out please?

Thanks,

Dave

[Reed]

what about just have fields (30) for each of the unique data items. Then adding one field for a patient_id and one date field and one time field. Then each time point for each patient is represented by one record. If you have a separate file that has one record for each patient, you could link the two files with a relationship where patient_id=patient_id Then in the patient file you would create a portal to the data items file with the new relationship. The portal would show records for each time point for that patient.

Is this the kind of thing you're trying to do?

Dana

[bruceR]

From what I can understand you should be creating related records with fields like ContactID, Date, TimePoint, DataItem, DataValue. Then you have the freedom to report on your data with lots of flexibility. You definitely do not want to create 30x17 fields. You could even use a global repeating field for data entry and then import using split-repeats to get the data into proper records.