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This should be easy, but I'm stuck: Record synchronization across files


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Posted

I have 3 files: Products, Transactions (includes all sale and non-sale customer contacts), and Summary. The summary file (at least at this stage of building) contains Name, Address, etc, as well as portals for Contact History and Order History (from relationship w/Transactions). Match field in the Summary file is Email---since my business is web-based, all my contacts have email addresses.

As with many posters here, I'd like the Summary file to automatically show records of customers who are created in the Transactions file. The last thing I want to do is manually type data into their match fields just to Lookup all their addresses, phone numbers, etc. But here's the catch: I don't want each record in the Transactions file to create a new record in the Summary file (the solutions I've run across in this forum seem to produce that result). If I've got 15 transactions with a single customer, I only want *1* record in the Summary file, not 15. That would mean that the FIRST transaction with that particular customer would create a new record in the Summary file, but no subsequent transactions would.

As I said in the subject, it seems like it should be so easy to do, and yet the solution eludes me.

Help!

Sincerely,

John

[ December 02, 2001: Message edited by: John Fowler ]

Posted

Customer information should only be in one file. From your description I initially thought the Summary file contained the names and addresses (which is customer information). Then later you say that the customer information is in the transaction file.

Could this be the problem -- you need to re-think the data design?

Posted

Oh yeah, huh? That would be pretty simple---customers in the Summary file, transactions elsewhere. I knew it was something right in front of me that I was missing. Story of my life...

Still, though: I want the relationship to be sort of static, sort of not. I want to look up the customer info from the Customer/Summary file so that a Sales Order/Transaction record will show the address I shipped to at that point, and won't reflect subsequent changes to customer information. Easy enough to do with a Lookup. But how, then, can I use that Sales Order to create a new record in the Customer/Summary file if that person is a brand new customer? Again, easy enough to do with "Allow creation of related records", but as far as I know, I can't do Lookups + Allow creation of related records. I'm thinking I'll just write a little script to create that record when necessary. I just wonder if there's a "relationships" way to do it, though.

Thanks!

John

Posted

You can do lookups and cretae a related record.

When a related record is made (say through a portal) *only* the "match" field is set -- it needs to be the customer number or whatever. All the other fields (address etc) can be looked-up via the relationship so that they retain their "historical" values.

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