Calculating percentages of pop-up value list

[Crump]

My first Database with FM pro 5.5 I have a text field with a pop-up value list of types of deliveries (I'm an obstetrician) ie. normal deliveries, various forcep deliveries and various cesarean sections. I haven't assigned a field value to any of these types of deliveries but I did out of neccessity define a value list in order to make the pop-up. My problem is that I would like to extract the data as percentages of total deliveries, ie. percent forcep type, cesarean section, etc. Do I need to go back and make a portal to the field and loose all my entries or is there some way to get at this in perhaps a running tally. Keep in mind when and hopefully if you answer that I have little knowledge of what I'm doing. Everyone at work says drop filemaker pro and go to a PC and use Microsoft access. I prefer the Mac

[Rigsby]

The first part of solving this problem needs some FM experience. The second needs some basic math, i.e. Excel. Without knowing the full structure of your file(s), however, I can only point you in the right direction.

Do you know what a self-relationship is? Because if you don’t want to use a second file, you will need one. If you create a self-relationship to create a portal, you will not lose anything. This would be one solution:

Firstly, you need to count the full total of deliveries – I trust you can do this?

Then -

Use your items field (pop-up menu) to create a relationship to itself. So for example, if the field is called <Item>, create a relationship using this field, lets call the relationship Rel_Item.

Now create a calculating field (not stored) called <count_items>, this will look like this:

Count(Rel_Item::A_Field)

A_Field is any field that always has a value other than 0

So now you know how many of any particular item have been taken.

Now create another calculating field (not stored), lets call it <Item_Percent> that simply divides <count_items> by the total number of deliveries, and set the field in your layout to percent.

I hope you can make sense of this, and that it helps.

Rigsby