my mind's running in circles on designing a database that keeps track of what each employee is assigned to doing every week. i wrote a few weeks back about putting every week's date as values into a repeating field (General Discussions>Filemaker Pro 7>dynamically limiting repeating fields).

so now i have got the weeks to show up correctly. but what i'm ultimately trying to implement is where each employee has a list of data(tasks) that correspond to each date. so far i've been playing around with repeating fields for this, making a repeating field for each employee record. see layout "Limited Reps" in my attachment.

i can figure out how to have the corresponding tasks show up when i "select start date." but, the most important part is that each field has to be editable. i can obviously do this from the layout mode, but i need to be able to do this dynamically. i made a form to fill out, where you type in the date and employee name, and the task they're doing that week. i would like to press a button, and have it insert that task into the appropriate place in the repeating field ("Assigner" in the attachment).

i'm finding out that repeating fields isn't the best choice for me. but how should i implement this? i can't use portals, because they only go vertically. i also started making separate fields for each date of each employee, but i'm eventually going to have 104 weeks to track, for 400 employees. i thought repeating fields would be the most efficient way...

can i pick your brains for any thoughts and ideas?

thanks,

fmbot.

empwrkbk.zip

I suggest that you forget that repeating fields exist. They can be useful for somethings but not for storing data. I don't understand why you can't use portals.

Take some time and learn about relational database design.

Well it sounds like what you need is a scheduling app...I would suggest that you look at the ones already available before building your own. There are many Filemaker based ones already available that you could use/modify. Do a web search and see if any fit your needs...worst case is that you will get some ideas on how to do this.

What you really have to track, from a relational database perspective (which is what you're using), is:

1. Person

2. Task

A task has a date (and possibly a time). Other "arrangments" of the data, such a view by week, are really just different ways of viewing the date attribute of the Task entity.

A view by week is displayed as the 7 days of the chosen week, each "day of week" is an unstored calculation, which combined with a relationship to the date field, will allow you to display the tasks in a horizontal week view, as a related field of the corresponding "column's" day-of-week relationship.

I'm attaching a file which has the calculations for those days of week (and month, and year). It actually has them 3 or 4 different ways, labelled by who came up with them! Just pick one. It's a little confusing perhaps, but I'm a little pressed for time. Maybe I'll whip up a little Week View example later.

It's a version 6 file, but should convert fine (famous last words).

DateWeeks.zip

cool, though i really appreciate the examples, i don't know this relates to my problem of designing fields that are tied to the dates. your examples seem like they're doing exactly what the repeating field of dates i have in my attachment is doing.

or am i not getting the point?

h.