Reports

[Sean O'Donoghue]

Not sure if this is the correct place for this - apologies if not. Could someone please help with following problem – I am new to Filemaker & attempting to put together a database.

If I sell 3 different items to X today, I have details in my database. I want to create an invoice, sum them up & add postage – how do I do it? This is a run of the mill type query / report in other databases I have used but I cannot get it to happen correctly in FMP5.5.

I do Find for X in the customer field & today’s date in the date field, which pulls out the 3 requested records but my problem is that I cannot place them together in the body of the record – what I am getting is one record per page.

Many thanks

Sean O’Donoghue

[LiveOak]

I'll give you the typical way to do this. Create two FM files, Invoice and Line Items. Each record in the Invoice file is an invoice, the items on the invoice are stored as related records in the Line Items file. With this structure you don't have to search for the line items corresponding to a particular invoice, the are related records connected by the Invoice No. (or better yet, record number) of the Invoice record. Printing is done from the Line Items file (records located by the Go to Related Record (show only related records) script step). Customer Name, address, etc. are related fields from the Invoice file displayed in the Line Items file.

Items on the invoice are entered in the Invoice file using a portal to the Line Items file. If the relationship between Invoice <---> Line Items is set to "allow creation of related records" you will be able to create a new line item record by just typing something on a blank line of the portal.

If this is all a little beyond you, it is time to read up on relationships and portals in the user's manual. Good references are the Coulombre and Price book and Scriptology by Matt Petrowsky and John Mark Osborne.

-bd