associating records

[Rob 7 Collins]

I have a database with some tables for families. One table is for children, one is for parents, and a third, "map":

fields:

internalkey

child.key

parent.key

family.id

I'd like to have a layout that would list parents and children and allow the user to select/highlight each and click an "associate" button. The script for that would use an approriate family.id if either the child or parent is already "related" in the database, but otherwise generate a new family id, adding a record to the map. If both are related, two records should be created that map both people to each family id (family structure really is complex that way, I think).

The main problem is, how do I list both parents and children on a single layout? If I use the family map table, it will only show relations already built.

[Rob 7 Collins]

I've tried creating a new table with these fields:

parent.key

child.key

created an instance in the relations graph (2 actually, because filemaker wants two instances when I draw the relations, I think because it creates a loop through the map table), and added "=" relations between the child and parent table keys and these fields. I set the options for the relation to cascade record additions and record deletions -- I hoped this would provide a single list of parents and children on one page.

For some reason when I add a child or parent record it does not create a record in my new table -- but even if it did, my layout can only work from one of the occurances. Anyway, I only have one occurance of parent and one of child in the relations graph, why is it not creating records? I thought at first it was because of how I worked with the relations graph, I added new occurances of parent and child tables and associated them seperately -- but I've removed those and used the original parent and child table occurances.

It's not so important to find an answer to that unless there's some way of showing record information from parents and children simultaneously in this layout. But, I thought maybe this approach would be fresh?