Avoiding compound keys

[Horacio]

I'm having a tough time trying to organize a potal/realtionship that reflects an order status as part of a customer profile.

Essentially I want to be able to view in one portal of all unfilled orders, in another all completed orders, cancelled orders etc.... and have summary data on each such as item counts, total costs total charges etc....

I have been able to do this using compound keys... the customer_id with -1 or -2 etc to separate the orders in the line item table to display in the customer profile view, but this sort of worries me from a schema design perspective (compound keys!!!) and makes me think I'm overlooking a feature of FM 8 that could achieve the solution with out compound keys?

Any ideas?

Edited October 20, 2005 by Guest
typo

[Ender]

It's better to use globals on the parent side of the relationship for each filter criteria. Then use FM7/8's multi-criteria relationship capabilities to relate both the key, and the filter criteria:

Customer <=> Order Unfilled =

Customer::CustomerID = Order Unfilled::CustomerID

AND Customer::gStatusUnfilled = Order Unfilled::Status

and

Customer <=> Order Filled =

Customer::CustomerID = Order Filled::CustomerID

AND Customer::gStatusFilled = Order Filled::Status

Where gStatusUnfilled is a global text field containing the text "Unfilled" (or whatever your unfilled status is,) and gStatusFilled is a global text field containing the text "Filled" (or whatever your filled status is.)