One file containing tables of Contacts (potential customers, customers together, everyone); invoices, lineitems, the works.

Boss will bring in 'new leads' for the Contacts table. I decided they should be put in a 'normalization and duplicate-checking' table before mixing with good active contacts. We have everyone together because finding is easier. Here's the sticker for me

Contacts are flagged as Active, Inactive or Dead. If Dead, I'll need to hide them in all my table occurences (by using Active

I prefer leaving all Active, Inactive, Dead, etc. records in the same file and playing a shell game with what the user sees. I find that hiding other than Active records form the users is easier than dealing with all the other side effects of trying to move records to another file and handling all the connections.

-bd

Well this takes a load off my mind in many ways. thank you. I just need to now learn how the play the shell game very well.

I'll get to work on it right now. Because between the two options it still seems the easiest and best.

And it shouldn't take long at all to master ....

The main thing is not to allow the user to "Show All Records" from the menu. With this option disabled, you must make sure you don't leave the user in a mode with no records showing and no way to perform the equivalent of a "Show All". If you give them a button for this function connected to a script, the script needs to perform a Show (mostly) All which meets your requirements for hiding Inactive & Dead records.

-bd

I would not have thought of this. In fact, I have many scripts which if nothing found do their own 'show all records'. I'll have to change all of these for sure to Show All Active Records. FM menus are totally locked and everything is script, thank you so much!! This would have been a problem for me otherwise.

I think FM7 wil be nice. Because I can base all table occurences on the Active Contacts instead (in most cases). Finds will alll need to be constrained to active. Good think FM stores our find requests so they are easy to reuse now. I cant imagine trying to do this in prior versions.