Newbie Questions....

[osiris612mb]

I am a newbie and am not that familiar wth all the functions of FMP7 yet.

Our database will hopefully be used for contacts, time and billing and document management solution for a large law firm.

1) We use client codes that are unique to all open case matters, but all closed matters will have a null client code since we recycle these codes randomly. Can this be done to have zero & unique numbers in a field without the possiblity of duplicates??

2) Also we have some clients that use multiple lawyers depending on the type of matter. Some lawyers will want to send mailings to a business address while another might want to send to a home address. Is there a way of selecting which address you want an envelope addressed to when you have more than one address per contact? and is there a simple way of using a radio button to select which address to use when only one lawyer will be sending mailings?

3) With regards to the document management module of our database, is there any feature that will allow version control? ie we can have upwards of 50 versions of the same document with litigation cases. and we want eachone saved in the DB without the possibility of replacing a previoiusly added document, (except for admin control who wouldn't be adding docs anyway.)

Thanks for any advice, I appreciate it... [email protected]

[transpower]

1. It's not recommended to recycle codes.

2. For each mailing, there could be a custom dialog prompt to select business address or residential address.

3. Have a separate table for version control.

[stanley]

Michael:

Welcome to the Forums.

FileMaker is capable of everything you specify, and I'll take them in turn.

1. Make sure that your contacts database has an automatically created non-modifiable serial number for each contact. Your users need never see it, but this is how you will ensure that your other tables are connected to the correct contact. As far as client codes are concerned, there are a number of ways to ensure that a unique code is used. Because you will have multiples with the same (null) code, you cannot simple set the field to "only accept unique values." What you should do instead is have a script that runs when a contact is created or edited, which will check through your contact db and make sure that if the code is not null, it is unique.

2. You can create a field called (let's say) t_Address_Choice, which would be set to a radio button with the values "Home" and "Business". When printing an envelope, in the print script you can check for which of these values is selected, then print the appropriate address.

3. Version management is also fairly simple. You can have a main document code (for example "1234") and a version code ("1", "2", etc), then each time a new version is created, you can alter the version code via a script. You would then have a separate calculation field which combines the two into a presentable number. So, if someone creates document "1234", that will be its number. If someone then opens it and wants to create a new version, you could have a scripted button to do this, which would go through the following steps:

1. Search the database for documents with the code "1234"

2. Sort them by the version code field

3. Take the last record's version code field and add one to it.

4. Duplicate the record and put the new version code in.

So, if you've got three versions of document "1234" the first would be "1234", the second would be "1234-1", the third would be "1234-2". There are obviously a number of ways to do this, all of which are a matter of choice based on your current business practices.

-Stanley

[osiris612mb]

Stanley--

Thanks so much for the help and reassurance that what we want to do is possible..

I think I know the answer of this question but I just want to make sure. with version management alot of the lawyers save their documents in folders on the server in a folder named with the specific lastname of the client and name their docs are fax cover01, fax cover02, fax cover03....

would this be possible to do so that they can keep doing that and have a unique number for each client? ie enter in the client name, which triggers the unique client number and then enter in this document name eventhough it will be the same as other docs in the database? And when they download a certain doc make changes to it and want to upload it again as a new doc that -1,-2 as you mentioned will just be added to the "filename" ?? **note** we don't want documents to be uploaded and replacing exsisting documents.**

Thanks

[stanley]

Michael:

Actually, the way I would do it would be to store the documents within your FMP database - if you're in a law office then you can afford the expense of running a dedicated FileMaker Server machine, and for reasons of data security, this is what I would do.

An individual lawyer can save his documents on his local machine, or on a file server. However, when entering the document into the FileMaker system for version control purposes, he'd put the file into a container (this can all be scripted for ease of use) and the record that container is in would get the proper version control number, as posited above.

Although many document formats are not readable while they are within the FileMaker container, the file can be yanked back out again for viewing.

-Stanley

[osiris612mb]

Stanley

Maybe I worded my last post incorrectly. I understand about storing the docs into the container field and that is what we will do once this portion of the database is created and ready to be implemented. We also have a seperated dedicated server for this database once it is up and running. We will also keep docs on the other server we are using currently for second backup purposes. The lawyers currently store thier docs into the the folders as mentioned and what we want to do is the following:::

enter in docs in to the container fields with names that will be the same for differing clients jones will have a fax_cover01 as will smith...and when jones enters in his second faxcover it will increment it to 02 while smith's faxcover stays at 01

AND we would like an option set so that if a lawyer happens to save a document to his desktop after getting it off the DB and then wants to add it to the DB he can NOT over-write the previously added doc.

Hope this makes more sense.

[stanley]

Michael:

That's understood. The methodology would be to ensure that the lawyers do not have direct access to the container field (so they can't drag-and-drop into it) but rather have to put the doc in there via a script. This way the script can check to see if the container is already filled, in which case it can show a dialog saying "this container holds file xxx; to add your current file, please create a new record" or something of that sort.

-Stanley