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Please help.

I am developing a database to manage logistics for a concert production company.

I have a table for individual inventory items, and I have a table that groups items together. For example:

10 Individual pieces of sound equipment gets grouped into a rack of gear called AFXRACK. Once the group of items is built, the idea is to put AFXRACK on to my reservation table so that 10 pieces of gear can be reserved using only one model number. The problem I have encountered is when I add an individual item onto a reservation, lookups are performed (description, price, etc). But a lookup can only refer to one table, so when I add a group item, the lookups are still looking to the Individual item table, not the groups table. I would like to keep these tables seperate because data entry gets muddy trying to put groups and individual items into the same database. My thought is if I could somehow create a table that would join data from the Indidvidual item table and the group items table, then my lookup problem would be solved while maintiaing two seperate tables. But I can't figure out how to do that.

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Roy

[Kurt Knippel]

You are making things too complicated. Your "Component" file (i.e. speaker, microphone, etc) is used to provide information to your "Item" (i.e. AFXRack, etc) file, which then provides information to your "Reservation" file.

The Reservation file only need to look into the Item file to get all of the pertinant data. You do not need to look into the Component file, let the Item file do that for you.

Setup all of you stuff in the Item file, if the Item has a bunch of different parts, then set those up in the Components file.

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Kurt Knippel

Senior Filemaker Developer

http://www.inthescene.com

mailto:[email protected]

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[Keith M. Davie]

I'm not sure I'm following you exactly, but if you write a script such that it finds in the group field first, it uses the data which is there. If there is no data there ( "" ), else search the items field and use that data, and if no data there, quit the script or perform new task.