could someone fix my portal ? - office space tracking system

[Steven Cappiello]

I am trying to build a building space tracking system.

My eventual goal is to have a view that shows all the active leases for 2 buildings per month.

The attached file will open to a layout that has 2 portals..

one which shows the leases related to the "date" field.

and the 2nd portal is meant to show the leases related to the "date_plus_one_month" field.

The 2nd portal is not working.. could someone tell me why ?

Also... in general, if anyone can comment on the way i'm approaching this problem, I'd love to hear any feedback anyone has for me. I'd eventually like to show not only the booked leases per date, but also a numerical count of the office space inventory... so that I could visually display the amount of booked and vacant modules per floor per month. But I'm not exactly understanding how I should try to aggregate everything to have that sort of view.

thanks :-)

space_tracking_.fp7.zip

[comment]

Your second portal is not working, because your layout belongs to the 'day 1' TO. Look at your graph, and track the relationship from 'day 1' to 'day 1 plus i month'. That is your portal's relationship - no wonder it doesn't work as expected.

To show 2 portals on the same layout, both relationship should start from the same TO. I would create another TOG on the graph for viewing, starting with the 'day' table and connecting new TO's of the other tables.

[Steven Cappiello]

of course!! : thank you !!

back to work!

[Steven Cappiello]

I've taken the suggestions and worked on it a bit more....

the layout that the new attached file opens to shows a list of the booked leases per quarter.

I'd like to eventually have a portal that shows the number of available bfm modules (bfm stands for building-floor-module) per floor per quarter

Will I need to create a new T.O. for each floor and for each floor/quarter ??

Or is there another way to aggregate the data ??

space_tracking_.fp7.zip

Edited March 10, 2006 by Guest

[Steven Cappiello]

Ah... I guess this is all a matter of perspective.. the latter scenario I suggest is from the point of view of the the floor table.. so I guess I have to come at it from there... and then look through the inventory of units to the lease table...

and somehow count the number of active leases per date I'm interested in..

is this the general idea :

[comment]

I would build the viewer table entirely on global fields and unstored calcs (one record). If you want to slice the viewed data by building, you will need to add a global gBuildingID field to the viewer, and a looked up BuildingID field to the lease (and perhaps a calc field to add a line of "All" to BuildingID). Same for floor.

The number of branches coming out of the viewer TO should equal the maximum number of viewed columns - so you don't need all those extre TO's. I would also make the two TOGs entirely separate.

[Steven Cappiello]

Thanks for the feedback. I think I understand.

What is the calc for the line of "All" to BuildingID for ?

(Can't I just not use it if don't want to slice by building?)

Do you see any advantage/disadvantage to my using one record per lease ?

compared to having a lease record that has multiple lease items..

Since there might be situations where more than one person share a space, or situations where a lease should refer to multiple rooms.. I thought it might be nice to have a way for one lease to represent this.. with a related table of lease_rooms and I guess lease_person

but I feel like this might get unwieldy.. ?

[comment]

If, at some point, you will want to look at leases for a particular floor, you will need to make floor part of your relationship. Once that is done, you can no longer see all floors - unless all floors share some common value, too.

I'm afraid I don't know enough to answer your second question. I would tend to treat a lease with multiple units like an invoice with line items. But if your work flow makes it more convenient to dispense with the wrapper and deal with just the items, it should work just as well.

[Steven Cappiello]

thanks comment. I'm not sure I did what you're suggesting.. but I took a crack at it and attached the file.

I've got this file doing pretty much everything I want.. and have a lease portal from the person table that allows me to enter multiple leases quickly for a person.. so that's nice.

My only big problem at this point is that the floor vacancy layout is slowwwww... I don't suppose anyone has any ideas about how I might be able to speed things up ? I have a feeling I'm doing one or two things in a way that might be unncecessarily cpu-intensive.

space_track_slow.fp7.zip

[comment]

Such complex layouts are always slow to redraw - download any calendaring solution and you'll see none of them are particularly fast. You can, however, speed it up significantly by removing the color containers. I often use a calc of TextColor ( "gggggggg" ; ... ). Formated with Webdings font, this produces a colored patch suitable for highliting. Being text, it draws faster than a graphic.

[Steven Cappiello]

thanks

Edited March 15, 2006 by Guest
oops wrong smiley

[Steven Cappiello]

So.. things are going great.. I showed this system to my boss.. she's very happy.. and likes the floor vacancy layout a lot..

she is hoping for one more little feature..

from that report.. she was wondering if it is possible to know which units are vacant.

I thought perhaps I could do this by creating a valuelist of all the units on a floor.. and then somehow subtracting a value list of all the leases active at that time... is that possible ?

or....is there some way to use a not equal relationship that will show me the units for which there is no lease on that date ?

-- perhaps I should post this specific question to the valuelist area

Edited March 15, 2006 by Guest
more specific to valuelist section