Relationship Issues.....

[macmangler]

OK... I have a contact database and a job database, their relationship is the contact id #. If I am in my contact database and hit the magic button to make a new job... I jump to my job database and all necessary records are in place.

Suppose I am at my job database and and want to change the client. Since the relationship is based on the contact id... yes, I can change that field and alter the clients info, but, that would require going to back to the contact database, finding the contact I want, memorizing or copying their id, jumping back to the job ticket and chaning the number.... a lot of steps... I am wondering if their is an easier way.

I am playing with an additional "drop down menu" of clients, but the list is long, and I have multiple contacts within one company.

I feel like it I need 2 different relationships on the same info to achieve what I want, but is that even posssible?

So I am stuck and confused. Your thoughts are much appreciated. My situation may be easy to fix, I might just need a quick slap to get this on track.

Mike

[Ricardo]

You could use a portal.

This would show all realted contacts to that job in your Job database/table.

You could then edit the relating contact within the portal.

HTH

Edited July 3, 2006 by Guest

[Razumovsky]

Hi Mike,

It does not seem like you want to edit any contacts, but rather assign a different one to the job, no?

First, does the job belong to a company, or to a contact within a company?

You could always put the Job::ContactID on the layout and format it as a drop down that return all values from Contact::ContactID, but also shows only values from a second field Contact::FullName and then check the type ahead button. Now, when you click on the field a list of all of your contact names would be there that would filter down with each letter you typed. When you selected the name, the corresponding ContactID would be added to the field, changing the relationship all from the Job layout.

Make sense?

-Raz

[macmangler]

This is starting to make sense....

I figured a drop down menu on the contact ID, but obviously I do not want to look at a bunch of numbers. How would I return customer and contact only and not the id?

Thanks for the input.

[macmangler]

And yes, some contacts have many many different contacts...

making this more difficult.

[Razumovsky]

In the valuelist setup dialog, you can specify a list to only display values from a second field. You would have this second field be ContactName. Now, it will display Contactnames, but return ContactIDs.

[macmangler]

Wow... this is great! Thanks... I made a calcualtion field for company name and then contact, since I only get a second field and not a second and third.

For some reason... only a few names are showing and not all of them... I am temporarily confused... but I think I will figure it out.

Many Thanks!

[macmangler]

For some reason.. if I sort by second list or display only second list, it craps out. Out of around 1000 records... it shows about 5.

If I let it display the contact ID and second field, it works great. Only downfall.... new contacts will be at the end of the list instead of alphabetically.

[Razumovsky]

If your calculation field uses data from a relationship, it will not be able to be indexed. This might be the problem. You could have it be an autoenter text (do not replace unchecked) or lookup, but you will have to account for the company name changing at some point in the future and figure out how to handle the refresh.

If each of your cantact names are unique for each company, you should be able to sort by either field as long as they are both indexed.