Need Help Relationships

[accounting]

Hi,

I am in a problem may be some one can give me the solution, I am running a college, and I am using file maker for the student record as well as for preparing letters for students.

There are five databases I am using now:

Student record

Acceptance Letter

Enrolment letter

accomodation letter

Support letter

What I want to do is if I enter one student data in Student record file and gave it a unique refernce number, and then i open the letter databases one by one and enter that unique student reference number then the student name and his address will appear automatically.

If some one knows the answer please let me know.

Regards

[Fenton]

The basic principle when you have something for people is to initiate it from the people side. Because then you already know who the person is. There are really two basic mechanisms for this:

1. Enter data into a portal, who's relationship has "Allow creation of related records".

2. Run a script to create the child record, using the ID of the person as a foreign key. There are a few ways to pass the ID to the child: global field, Script Parameter (7, 8), script Variable (8 only). Basically you set one of these to the ID of the person, then use that to set the person's ID in the new child record.

You would probably use the 2nd method, especially if you want to see or print the letter. Because it's running a script you can do much more than just create the record. You would go to a layout of the "letter" to create the record.

Now, about the letters. I would only have 1 Letters file (or table), with a "type" of the letter as a field. Each letter could have its own layout.

In fact, if you just want to print these letters, and do not want a "history" for each student of what was sent, then you do not need a "letters" table at all; you can just use different layouts of the Student table.

If the "letters sent" was 1 file/table, you could show which letters had been sent to a particular student in a portal on the Student's Form view layout. I guess you could show them if they were different files/tables also, as different related fields/portals. But it's not very good relational design.