I work for a 24 hrs TV station, and they really need a db system that can handle the mess. They are looking for an consultant on fixed basis who makes C++ code and apps on his own. I, on the other hand have worked some in FM6 Dev. and would like to try to make a db. My primarly tasks are video post production, though.

One of my fellow worker, who work with a schedule of programs to broadcast, sit on a Excel sheet and have a post for every half hour during a day, all the days of the week. One week is one sheet, and he is doing a lot of paste/copy work. When I saw this I was thinking about this main Excel doc could be the main db where you could see all the hours during a day, maybe listed in a portal row, or some other turn which I would like some input from you who would like to help me. All of the different programs to broadcast that are scheduled, would have their own db where its unic ID and broadcast schedule would be known. I'm thinking of a portal row list in this db to show priority and status of post production up to its deadline. A relationship from the main schedule db would be established so the the information you give in the child db about airtime would show in the main schedule db.

I hope I make sense here, I really don't know!

Snekkis

The basic structure of the broadcast schedule would have files for Program, Broadcast, and Day (or Week depending on how many days you want to see the schedule overview.) It's not clear what you need to track in the production schedule, but I imagine you would want some sort of Task list that's a file related to either the Program or the specific Broadcast.

Scheduling databases can get fairly complex. The schedule overview interface alone will require a relationship for each time slot (and for each day's time slots if you plan on showing a whole week.) Performance tends to degrade when you have fields from many different relationships on the same layout. Creating recurring events adds some complexity to the scripting.