Checkboxes and relationships

November 11, 200421 yr

Newbies

What we are trying to do here for our school district is create a tech alert database where we can have X amount of check boxes for each of the buildings in our district. What we also have is a separate database with all of the staff emails separated by building.

We are currently trying to make it where you can click a check box and it will automatically identify with the emails for the school. So basically if we want to send out an alert to each of our 11 Schools, we check each of the 11 boxes, click the 'send alert' button and our message will go to each email address at each school.

Im not exactly sure if this has to do with relationships or more of a script. This probably sounds really confusing, so if anyone thinks they can help or would like me to break it down even more, let me know. Thanks for any help!

November 11, 200421 yr

So assuming your structure is something like this:

Staff file:

StaffID

Name

BuildingID

Alert file:

AlertID

Date

Time

SendTo BuildingID

Text to Send

Subject to Send

From Name

Where Staff and Alert are related by Building ID and SendTo BuildingID.

Using this structure we can jump to the related buildings' Staff members and loop through them to send individual emails:

#From Alert file

Go to Related Records [ Show , Staff by SentTo BuildingID ]

Go to Record/Request/Page [ First ]

Loop

Send Mail [ <Use Staff::Email and related Alert fields> ]

Go to Record/Request/Page [ Exit after last, Next ]

End Loop

If you have a plugin for sending mail, then you can assemble all the email addresses in a global and send it all in one email (FileMaker's Send Mail is limited to 255 characters for To: addresses.)

If you are using the Send Mail script step, you might find its use of the client's email program a bit intrusive and unreliable. In my organization, we have opted to use one dedicated machine to actually send the mail. The clients simply create records in a file with the email text in fields, then when they are done, the dedicated machine sees the new records and sends them out. (I use the SMTPit plugin.)