Exporting multiple record instances

[nlo]

Hi,

I hope this is the right forum for my question, which tries to drive me crazy and I must have a solution until the end of the week. So, any ideas will be helpful.

I am working on a project with persons and items and I need to export data (from persons or from items) in order to print some kind of labels. This file will be imported into QuarkXpress or InDesign, where there are the proper printing layouts.

The problem is that i need the data from any field to be included

(repeated) as many times as the value of the field "repeats" specifies, into the tab delimeted file I produce.

Example (in the persons db)

Suppose that my found set contains the following data

Fields Record1 Record2 Record 3

name Jason Kathy Mike

address Street 1 Street 2 Street 3

zip 18672 18688 18627

city City A City A City A

repeats 3 1 2

I need the tab delimeted file I produce to be:

Jason Street 1 18672 City A

Jason Street 1 18672 City A

Jason Street 1 18672 City A

Kathy Street 2 18688 City A

Mike Street 3 18627 City A

Mike Street 3 18627 City A

Is it something I can do with FMP8A?

Any help will be realy helpful

Thanks in advance[color:blue][color:blue][color:red][color:blue][color:blue][color:blue][color:blue][color:blue]

[comment]

See the attached for a possible approach.

ExportMultiple.fp7.zip

[nlo]

comment,

Thank you very much for your answer

The resulted file is exactly what I am looking for !

I will try to adapt it now in to my project, both in persons and items. My items table has now about 200 records and when the data entry will finish, will has about 30000 records, all of which will contain an image. Also, each day will take place about 30 exports, based on different found sets. Do you believe that it will be fast enough? (The application runs on a PowerMac G5 DualCore 2.3 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM).

Now let me ask another question.

Is it possible to perform a find based on an excel file, which contains the find criteria?

What I mean is:

any salesman in the company who needs labels for some items, provides the db operator with an excel (or text) file with the "itemCodes" and the corresponding "repeats". How can i transform this info to findRequests?

Thanks again for your time and help

[comment]

I don't know the answer to the first question. 2x2.3 G5 is a fast machine, and 30k records is not an awful lot - but "fast enough" is subjective. It shouldn't be too hard to populate the database with artificial records and test it under the expected conditions.

Regarding the second question: there are several way to do this, I believe the following is the simplest, and also least dangerous to existing data:

Import the salesman's file into a dedicated table - let's call it Imported. Imported is related to your main file (Contacts in the demo) by ContactID. Now, if you define the repeating calculation field in Imported, instead of in Contacts, you can do the import into Temp from Imported, instead of from Contacts.

I hope that's not too confusing - it's a two-step import process, but at the end you should have the same result.

[nlo]

comment

Thanks again for your answer. I'll try to use your suggestion and tell you the resuls