Import 'many' and the 'one' if it is new

[juggledad]

I'm looking for some direction.

Background

This aplication is for a pottery co-op to generate firing fees every couple months. During the period, several kilns are fired with each kiln containing many pieces from different members. For each piece, a firing slip with the members name, the height, width and length of the piece is recorded. This data is entered into a flat file and the name of the file is the date and kiln that was fired. So the data from one firing might be

FILENAME: 20060106 BAILEY

ann 2 3 3

ann 3 4 4

ann 2 3 3

ann 4 2 2

joe 7 4 3

joe 2 3 3

joe 2 3 3

etc, etc

I wrote a script that grabs the file name to enter as a field in the Fring Slip table (see 'How to get imported filename into script Topic# 173032 for a sample Filemaker only script) and now I want to take the next step. I want to make it bigger and better and take over the world ha ha ha ha..ha..ha......oops, ignore that last bit.

I currently have defined three tables:

Members (with member info),

memberid

other fields

FiringFees (cost info for the member/firing),

memberid

kilnid

firingdate

other fields

FiringSlips (multiple occurances as described above)

memberid

kilnid

firingdate

other fields

The Member occurances have been created and my import script creates the firing slips. How can I AUTOMATICLY create a firing fee occurance to tie the member to the firing slips?

I tried creating a second script to import the firing slips into the FiringFees table, but ended up with too much data. I can't figure out how to do an import from a flat file and only create one new occurance of a record per key fields, even if there are multiple records in the file with the same key. (remember the file being imported is just a text file with the data tab seperated.

Any ideas or pointers will be gratefully accepted (a really good solution might get you a piece of pottery!) thanks in advance.

[juggledad]

Ok, Nobody gets the pottery, I figured it out myself.

What I did was to write another script to do a find of the duplicates then justview the omitted records. This results in one occurance for each member/date/kiln. Then I just setup a loop looking at each record, set varibles equat to the memberid, firing date and kiln, switch to the firing fee laout, do a New Record, set the fields to the variables, swap back to the original layour and do a 'Goto Record [Next; exit after last]. that's the end of the loop and tada it works. If anyone wants to see the actual script, let me know and I'll post it