Count Inventory

[asevie]

I've been away from FileMaker for almost 7 years, I can't belive how much one forgets the little things. I'm working on a simple inventory system for a friend. It simply tracks products that his company sells (mostly furniture).

A Product Line contains several products, each product has different finishes. When I am looking at the Product Line, I am summarizing the total of each Product (and subsuquent finishes) within the line. I am doing this by creating a field that is an auto entered value of 1 (called Constant). Then I'm using a self relationship to Count (selfbyProductID::Constant). Works great when I'm on the machine directly, but silly me didn't think about the network consequences. It is almost as bad as the Today calc being calculated on an old Quadra 700....s......l......o.....w.

What is the best way to summarize the totals? Each record in the product table is one item in inventory, always. There are only about 45 different products. The product table has about 1300 records. Perhaps one day it will grow to 5 or 6000, but not much larger than that. So, again, how to summarize the total inventory of a product and view it from another table via a Product Line -> Product relationship? Is count good, or should I be using Summary fields etc? Thanks,

aS

[Wim Decorte]

Not sure I quite follow how you're doing it.

In my mind your structure would look like this:

- product table (key: productID) - the different types of products

- Finish table (key Finish ID) - the different types of finishes

- a join between table and finish (joinID, finishID, productID)

- an inventory table (inventoryID, joinID, # available)

a relationship through those tables with a COUNT like you are using will show the availability on a product layout, and should be fast enough for the purpose. There aren't that many records.

[aaa]

5 or 6000 is not very big number. It must not be slow. May be if you work on fmserver will be more quickly. If not, you can for total field, which is a global field, create button for calculating as

Set field[Total,Sum(......)] in script.

Then this field will not prevent to work.

[asevie]

Not sure I quite follow how you're doing it.

In my mind your structure would look like this:

- product table (key: productID) - the different types of products

- Finish table (key Finish ID) - the different types of finishes

- a join between table and finish (joinID, finishID, productID)

- an inventory table (inventoryID, joinID, # available)

a relationship through those tables with a COUNT like you are using will show the availability on a product layout, and should be fast enough for the purpose. There aren't that many records.

That is essentially the structure. Count is working but when I access this over a 100Mbit LAN (which is plenty fast) the summarizing slows to a crawl, literally taking 10-15 seconds to flip between records.