Newbie question re. relationships

[catboy]

I'm a newbie to FileMaker but I'm enjoying the chalenge

I've come up against the following problem:

I'm building a application to generate quotes/orders and invoices.

I'm progressing nicely with learning how to work the scripts, etc(thanks to this forum mostly) but I think I have made a mistake in my relationships.

I have a company table and a contacts table and when I start a new order I can select the company and contact using drop downs.

My problem is that any company can and does have more than one contact and I can't work out how to associate a contact with a particular company.

I also want to be able to go from the contact page to the new order page and keep the company information already entered (as opposed to having to choose my company again.

I've attached my file - please forgive the many schoolboy errors.

I'm on version 8.5 by the way

PromosLite.fp7.zip

[aldipalo]

You need to relate Company to Contact and Contact to Orders.

Take a look at revised TO's

HTH

PromosLite_Copy.zip

[catboy]

Thanks a lot, that seems so obvious now that you have told me. Can;t belive I missed the obvious.

That seems to have solved my problem. One last question though - instead of having to choose the company, can i bring the name of the company accross from the company page (when using the "new contact" button on the company page).

[catboy]

I've had bit more time to look at this and although it solves my company/contact problem now it seems to have messed up my relationship with the order table

The problem now is that on the order layout although the choose company drop down menu works, it does not populate the company details fields once you have selected the company.

Also I only want to show the relevent contacts and not all the contacts in the contacts dropdown field.

I've attached my file to illustrate the issue.

Can you also answer another question please so that I understand this issue better. When you look at my relationship table is my company table like a parent table to my order table even though it via the contact table?

PromosLite.fp7.zip

[aldipalo]

Take a look at the changes. I think this does what you want. If not I'm sure that if you play around with the relationships you'll get what you want.

In answer to your question about Parent- Child relationships, Company is the parent to Contacts and Order2. It's like a family tree. One (Parent), Many (children).

There is a very good tutorial out there that I read when I first started using FM, but, I can not seem to locate it right now. Perhaps someone else viewing this thread may have the link for you.

HTH

PromosLite_Copy.zip