I'm developing an application that requires someone enter lab test results into it. There are often 30 or so numbers to enter from any given lab report.

Unfortunately, different labs have different formats, including the order of the various results.

The specifications for my application call for the user to be able to set-up the order of the fields for data entry. I assume that a user would just do this one time only - or very rarely - as users would change labs rarely. One thing that is NOT an option, would be to hard-code it in a few different formats. No one is quite sure of all the differnt lab formats that exist.

I'm looking for your experiences and suggestions on how best to handle this.

Thanks in Advance,

Mark L.

If table view is an option, users can easily drag the fields to whatever order they please.

Otherwise, you'll probably want to create a generic layout, and then give the users the ability to modify that layout. Just set up their privilege set to allow editing of just that layout. Or allow them to create new layouts but not modify any layouts that you've set up.

Doing this without layout mode would be tough, probably you'd want to set up a bunch of generic global fields, with user-selectable field labels (maybe with popup lists) then use a script to create and edit the actual records via these globals. The user-defined labels could be used as script parameters.

Dana

Reed-

Thanks for your posting. I'm still at a loss at how best to tackle this situation - but your input was valuable in that it seems that there is no magic bullet to my problem.

Thanks again,

Mark L.

You might try using globals as key fields for each column in a list view, then use a separate relationship for each column's related fields.

Attached is an example (check out the Visit List layout.) You could store the order of the columns in a User table, and populate the globals when the user open this up.

Lab.fp7.zip

Ender-

Thanks so much for taking the time to create that attached example. You really have me thinking now.

I'm guessing this method would work with a relatively small number of fields that need to be sorted - but I've got about 90! I think I'd be overrun with the potential relationships - but excuse me if I haven't fully gotten your concept/example - it's very late, and I still need to digest it.

Thanks again for your input - I'll post more questions about it as I experiment with your concept. (I'm also glad to see that five people downloaded your example before I did - so hopefully others are benefiting from your hard work too.)

-Mark L.

-Mark L.