I have what may be a simple question. I have a pretty complicated dbase going and I have a bunch of Join tables connecting many-to-many relationships. They work fine. In addition to using the 3 fields I need in a join , Join id, Table1 id and table2 id I used a bunch of fields to do lookups to put data in the join table from the other two tables. I then used these fields in portals throughout the dbase... only problem (i learn now) is that they don't change when someone changes data in the first tables. Should I have just used the three primary fields in the join table...and then accessed the other data via relationships? is that best practice? Was there any reason I did what I did, or was it just inexperience?

hard to say. Could you post a picture of the graph and the field definition for the lookup you're using?

Thanks for the reply. I think I answered my own question. After some experimenting, I've realised that most of my lookups were redundant... but there were some fields in the join tables that were unique to the join record and those obviously belonged there.

thanks.