Hi--

I have been running through the tutes and videos, I am getting a handle on relationships, and now I am getting ready to make the plunge. I am building a Job/Time tracking database, for multiple employees, multiple jobs, and multiple products. A job is a yearly iteration of a product, we publish yearly in most cases, so we have product X, job 2005. My first puzzler (for me, not the FM whizzes), not all jobs are divided into the same time periods. Most are published yearly, some quarterly, some monthly. Can a product be feb, Q2, 2005, while most are just 2005?

Anyways the meat of my question has to do with relationships. I would like to track hours according to job, employee, date, product, etc. I am new to the many/many relationship, is this what it is? How many Hours fields in my HOURS table will I need? If I put in an hour on 4/26/05, will I then be able to look at it in multiple contexts like I listed above?

Is the hourly component just a complicated SORT feature, or is it more complex than that?

Well, that pretty much explains my starting point, any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Overall, the filemaker learning curve has been interesting, trying to think in entities and relationships for the first time is pretty frustrating, but it makes sense all at once, it seems.

Thanks again, my specs are below:

FMP 7.0V3

Win XP SP-2 &

OS X 10.3.9

I pretty tired right now, but I'll give a basic answer to get you started.

"Can a product be feb, Q2, 2005, while most are just 2005? "

Yes. Define a field in the Product Table for just this. You can make it a number (1-Yearly, 2-Quarterly, 3-Monthly), or just spell it out in a Text Field. The numbers are faster, but the Text field is easier to read & maintain.

At that point, you will probably run scripts for your reports. For a Monthly Script, look for the Monthly Products (and so forth).

You might need smarter scripts that use all Products in a end-of-year report, Quarterly & Monthly for end-of-quarter (and so forth).

Once you mark the product though, you can pick & choose which Products to use. When you pick the Products you want in a Found Set, they can use any Relationship you choose.

...

As for the Many-To-Many Relationships, I don't think that is really what you want to consider. You want multiple Relationships (could be Many-To-Many, One-To-One, Many-To-One or One-To-Many).

You will have a Relationship (or several) for Hours & Jobs, one (or several) for Hours & Employee, one (or several) for Hours & Products (and so forth). You can then pick & choose which Relationship to use for a particular script or layout.