Embarrasing Newby Question

[Ginxy33]

I am having a bit of trouble understanding TO's

Say I have an Orders Table and a OrdersPart Table. I want to be able to make a new OrdersPart for that orders table so I create a OT NewOrdersPart. Now I know, at some point (?) the variables in NewOrdersPart are stored in the OrdersPart table right?

What if you have other tables attached to the OrdersPart Table...such as Size,or Color. Do I now have to make OT's for them and attach them to the NewOrdersPart OT? or can they get that information from the origanal Size, or Color table through the OrdersPart Table?

[T-Square]

To start with, there's no such thing as an embarrassing Newby question--especially not when talking about the Relationships graphs!

The thing to keep in mind here is that the Relationship graph is an intellectual construct that primarily instructs Filemaker how to interpret the fields you put on layouts, as well as those you put into calculations. The relationships graph determines what Filemaker calls the *context* of a field when it is placed on a layout or used in a calculation.

With that in mind, if you build a layout based on your NewOrdersPart TO, then the data *will* be put in the underlying OrdersPart data table.

The brief answer to your subsequent questions is that you do need to add TOs linked to the NewOrdersPart TO to achieve what I suspect is your preferred result.

Let me elaborate: In the graph you offer, the NewOrdersPart TO is linked to the Orders TO, which is itself linked to the OrdersPart TO, which is then linked to 3 TOs based on Colors, and depending on which InkColor field you place on your NewOrdersPart layout (the one from Ink Colors 1, 2 or 3), you will get different results. Moreover, all of this is dependent on the value you have stored in gOrderParts, which I assume is a global, and therefore not predictable by me, since you have to set it somewhere that I can't see. Finally, since the link between Orders and OrdersPart is one to many, I think you will get the colors based on the first matching OrdersPart record in that table, which may or may not be the same as the record in NewOrdersPart.

David

[Ginxy33]

Thank you so much, that was very helpfull.

Gina