In my educational database I have the follow relationships between tables with one to many relationship from one table to another. It is like a chain.

The Ierarchical tree of tables:

Ministry

Peripherals

Administration

Sub-administration

Schools

Classes

Sub-classes

Students

There are also tables:

Attendance

School year

Periods

Teachers

The problem I have in this database is that it cannot pass the current school year in all student records at once without to oblige the user

to confirm the field in the record. Imagine the extra work someone has to do. Perhaps it needs a new database for every school year.

Another problem is that it cannot pass also in all the records the students school name.

I need some advise and ideas if you have. A user can avoid to confirm about 2000 fields if I find a respectable solution. In this way database can be so reflexable to hold the students and schools for a whole country, if it is a small country of course!

Pascal

Happy new year!

One I know that I do not know almost anything...

Socrates the Greek

without to oblige the user to confirm the field in the record

I don't know if others have the same problem, but can't figure out what this refers to???

The creation a small template showing this behaviour, might be beneficial!

--sd

Let me explain a little more.

If schools table has a foreign key in students record the only think that a user might to do is to select the list with the value of a school in a popup window in students record. So a user has to complete one field more the school name. However if that foreign key of the schools table is in classes table, for example, when a user select the class and the subclass, school name can be completed immediately without the user interfering or complete a field. In this case database can have problems when a user complete records from two or more different schools because classes assigned to a particular school only and not to the others. Or we have to create class records for these schools also and loose the advantage.

This is a big problem in educational databases and I know that other progs or software have problem to manipulate data from different schools and different schools years. The most of them have a database for every shool year and shool building. But Filemaker do not allow us to create a new database for every school or school year in the same file. We have only tables. I hope you understand.

Pascal

But Filemaker do not allow us to create a new database for every school or school year in the same file. We have only tables

Doesn't it? I have now on several occation raised that a recursive relational structure lets you add as much as you wish inside the same table.... checkout this thread:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/183297/post/234386/hl//

--sd

This is a revolution I think about FM and how can be in the future. I mean to integrate such mechanisms inside the program. For me it is difficult yet for example to handle FM variables and I need an option to the program. Thank you anyway for the responce. Probably I will try to create a years table and handle time there with a variable or like that.

Pascal

Now the template in the other thread uses ID's for key lockers etc. but in real life, should it be the ID that pulls in the name of either the institution, teacher or student. So a table more is required.

But no it isn't a revolution that filemaker can deal with recursive relational structures. A fair share of other tools can do similar.

--sd