Hiho, I seem to grasp the basics of portals and relationships between files. Here is my dilemma.

What I want to do is...

There are 7 employees. Every employee will fill out a weekly report, consisting of the number of hours worked each day and detailing what was accomplished each day, as well as summary of what was done each week. So Employee#1 on Week #1 did 8 hours monday and detailed what they did, same for every day for the rest of the week. At end of week there is a summary of what Empoyee#1 did on Week#1. This is twhat each employee does and is repeated for week#2 and etc..

Is one way of doing this to make a unique_id based on Employee_Id&Week_No?

This way I'll have 8 .fp5 files:

File one = unique_id, Employee_id,Week_No, Weekly_Summary

Files two through eight correspond to each day of the week.

ie. File monday.fp5 = unique_id,Hours_Worked,Work_Detail

File tuesday.fp5 = unique_id,Hours_Worked,Work_Detail

File wednesday.fp5 = ...

Is this too many files for something simple?

And how would I create the unique-id field and what would I relate to what...

Any and all help appreciated,

rich

I think you are confusing data and structure. The days of the week are just data. You only need two files 1) employees and 2) timekeeping. I would make each entry in timekeeping the smallest atom of time information you can. It is MUCH, MUCH easier to sum small increments of information than break apart weeks to try and get a summary of a single charge number across all employees! (Don't even think of throwing in repeating fields!).

Each record in timekeeping can be an employee/date/charge account/time increment. You can use multiple relationship to display these in any matrix way you wish, say by week. It just takes some tricky work with keys. A key for one portal display might be an employeeID/date or an employeeID/week, etc.

These opinions come from having written multiple, complex time billing systems.

-bd

Thank you...

Much appreciation is sent your way!!

rich