Hello

I'm working on a project involving pedigrees. Each animal has a file which includes the following fields:

ID

Fathers ID

Mothers ID

From this type of file I would like to build a four generation pedigree (family tree). I can get the first generation (Father &Mother)with a self joining relationship. Can anyone help me with the next generations (gandfathers & grandmothers)

Thanks for any help

Because Filemaker won't look past one record in a relationship, you have to force your data to propagate down record to record by using lookup fields (rather than just displaying related fields) and then doing a series of successive Relookup commands--one for each generation that you want to show. Since you want to have 4 generations, you need to do 4 relookups after you have the basic data entered into all the fields. The exact details of how to do this are going to be very specific to how your data is arranged and how you want to display it.

To play around with this, make the following text calculation field:

Family = "( "& ID & " " & MFamily & " " & FFamily & " )"

where Mfamily is a lookup field based on the mother relationship which looks up Mother::Family,

and Ffamily is a lookup field based on the father relationship which looks up Father::Family.

Now, if you do 4 relookups on the ID field, it will set the Family field to the family tree in parenthetical style syntax (like the LISP programming language uses). Converting the parenthetical format into a tree diagram is an exercise in text parsing which you will have to figure out.