I am Flummoxed!! I have three files related my first file is departments, it is related by department to its catagories which is related to it's subcatagories.

My big problem, when I create a Department everything works fine. When I create the catagory Everything also seems to work fine including looking up default values from department. But when I create sub-catagories the lookups do not pick up the values. My sub-catagories is related to the catagories by a calculated field 'department &"/"&Catagory this has been indexed in order to allow it to be used for a join.

Am I doing something wrong?

Get rid of the "/" char. It behaves like a "white space" character.

Just conacatenate the strings together.

Incidentally, if the department or categories have spaces in them then this might also cause problems. Also I think only the first 20 chars are indexed !!!

Whenever possible you should use unique serial numerical IDs for the key fields in your relationships to avoid problems like this.

Out of the subject, but how do you index a calculation field? by that I mean a field type defined as calculation, not an auto enter by calculation?

I thought it was not possible to index a calculated field.

David

Calculated fields can be indexed except under certain circumstances. For example, you cannot index a calculation that refers to a related file.

I have made changes to field makup as discussed earlier. I am now getting my dropdown lists to work correctly, but I also have a number of lookup fields none of which are looking up. Is there something that I am missing. This is my first real project with filemaker, so maybe I am missing something.

Mark,

It would help if you gave specific details on what fields are not looking up properly and how you have them setup.. ie. how the relationship is set up and where they lookup the data from. That isn't entirely evident from the first post.