Value lists and summaries

[philharmonic]

There's probably an obvious way to do this... but I haven't found it, so I'll ask you guys.

The retreat centre I work for has an existing Bookings database. I've created a new file that allows them to print off an invoice/receipt for each person that has retreated here or purchased something. The section that we keep has a number of fields to be filled in on how much people spent on our services and products. I then created a summary layout that can be printed off for our records that lists specific info from all the receipts in the found set. (Still with me?)

At the bottom of this list is a summary of how much was spent on each service/product. The problem I have run into is with donations. On the invoice/receipt layout, the 'donation amt' field is filled in and then a type of donor is chosen from the 'donation type' value list menu (eg. reg. donor, board member, church, etc.). The value list has an 'other' option so you can type in your own value.

I would like the summary to list each of the categories from the value list that have been used in the found set with the total donation amounts for each of those categories. It would be easy to create fields to do this for each of the existing options and a final "other" category, but this is not good enough. The categories listed on the summary must include whatever has been filled in when the user clicks on the "Other..." option in the value list. Here's an example to make it clear:

The value list looks something like this:

Board Member

Staff

Associate

Reg. Donor

Other...

Let's say that in the found set 3 "Donors" have made donations of $50 each, and we've had 2 corporate donations of $1000 and $500. For the corporate donations the user would have clicked on "Other..." in the menu and typed in "Corporate" as the type of donation.

What I need the summary to say is:

Reg. Donor - $150

Corporate - $1500

I don't know how to explain this any clearer... hope you understand my problem... and I hope you have a solution!

Thanks

Philip Paschke

[Moon]

Set a subsummary part in your layout sorted by donation type. Include the field that summarizes your donations and the donation type field.

[plcamp]

I'm new here, need some help with something...

I've got FMP 5, and am part way through design of 5 interlinked databases to control discovery of certain electronic parts from a flat-file extract of a large Oracle database.

One of the things I want to do is allow a pop-up menu selection with a value list "from a field" - but the number of unique entries int hat field is so large that the pop-up menu extends off the visible screen area - result is that you can't see and you can't scroll over to items in the last half of the list.

Ideally, a heirarchical value list with first selections "a-f", "g-n" etc would be used to get a smally choice list subservient to the first choice.

Any of you folks know how to do that?