Should I use Repeating Fields or related records?

[Bruenor]

I am designing a payroll book for our accounting staff that holds shift, absence, and overtime information. Each employee has a value for shift hours, absence and overtime for each day in a month. The reports that are generated are based on monthly summations.

I can see doing this three ways. The first is to define three repeating fields with 31 repetitions each, and then work around them. the second is what my supervisor wants me to do, is create 93 fields in place of the repeating fields . The final option, the one i think would be best, is to create a related file of daily records, and then just use portals and a relationship based on month/year/name. one problem with this approach is that the daily file would have TONS of records (150 employees).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

thanks,

Ati, Jedi Master

[LiveOak]

If you even think of using any approach except the third, I will "I told you so" to death when you post a message asking how to produce a total sick hours report! The problem with the repeating field approach is that it is EXTREMELY hard to extract data for reports. If each entry is an individual record, they can be sorted and reported by employee, project, or whatever. Don't worry about the number of records, they are usually small in size each and 100,000 record databases of this type are not a speed or size problem.

-bd

[eremaut]

Hi,

The worst FM ever invented was the repeating field, they should have removed it when they came with there relationship-support under FM 3.0.

But the guys from FM realy have a backward-compatibility desease, so ...

Like LiveOak already suggested, don't use it.

So, go for the related file. Go, go, go ...

Erwin

[Bruenor]

Thanks for the advise, i'm already halfway through implementing the related file solution. It's turning out to be much easier than i thought.

~Ati, Jedi Master

[rhakka]

so my suspicions are correct? there really is no reason to use repeating fields any more?

[Kurt Knippel]

quote:

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Originally posted by rhakka:

so my suspicions are correct? there really is no reason to use repeating fields any more?

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Not entirely true. I use global repeating fields for storing variables and icons. Much cleaner than having to create a ton of globals.