I hope tha ti am in the place for this question, if not, Moderator please move it.

I am trying to build a database for keeping track books sorted by subject. I use the LC (Library of Congress) CIP subject descriptions. The problem here is that there are an essentially unlimited number of subjects that are possible for each title.

An example, for the book "Salvage Man: Edward Ellsberg and the US Navy" by John Alden the following subjects apply:

Ellsberg, Edward, 1891-

Marine engineers--United States--Biography.

Salvage--United States--History--20th century.

I have a file with the title and other relevant information already entered into it. The Subject listings are currently in a repeating field, this however is completely changeable. What I want to be able to do is to sort on each of the subject listings and print out the list with the title listed under each of the subject headers.

What I want to do is take the single record with multiple subject headings on it and turn it into three (in this example) records with the title information on it that is then sortable by subject.

I am using 5.0 at the moment. Is this something that would be easier in 6.0 or even 7.0?

I hope this makes some sense to people, and that I have not made a complete muddle of this description.

Roman

I have a feeling that your file could be better structured but let's look at the problem you have posed - how do you take the file with a repeating field and turn it into a file with repeating records and a non-repeating field? The recommended method is: make a clone of the file, open the clone and import the original records and in the additional import options dialog choose to split the repeating field into separate records.

Thankyou much. that solved one part (a major part) of the problem. The next question is: is it possible to only have it seperate one repeating field and leave others alone?

I am sure that there is a better way to do this, but I am dealing with an existing database with several thousand records in it, and I really do not want to mess around with redoing all of it.

Roman

I set up a test file to try to answer your question and noted that the behaviour of the import is somewhat unexpected. The repeating fields are split over new records BUT the other fields are not duplicated so there is more to do before using this technique. You can still do it I believe by using Auto-enter last visited record's data on all fields that are not repeating. However, with the simple test that I did all repeating fields were separated so I think you need to be looking for a different solution if you have repeating fields that need to stay repeating.