Invoice relationship

February 14, 200718 yr

Hi,

I'm having a small problem conceptualizing relations between three tables and the layout using these tables.

A have those tables: invoices, clients and contacts.

Here is my idea of the relationship. The invoice is sent to the client. A client is usually a financial institution, which can have many employees. Those employees are the contacts inside the client.

A Client can have many invoices, but an invoice is for a single client.

An invoice is ask by a single contact from our client. This contact can have many invoices to his name.

My relationships are the following.

Invoices: pkInvoiceID, fkClientID

Clients: pkClientID

Contacts: pkContactID, fkClientID

Are these ok? I think so. If not, what would be a good solution?

But my main problem is the layout.

How in the invoice layout can I choose the bank in a list and after the Contact who ask for a service from that bank?

Thank you

Edited February 14, 200718 yr by Guest

2 weeks later...

February 24, 200718 yr

Sorry no one replied before now.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I've attached a file that should help. Basically, you create a third relationship between Invoices and Contacts, using fkClientID on both sides. The invoice draws the company/client name from the related Client record, and the contact name from the related Contacts record, via a pop-up menu (value from field: invoices_contacts_ClientID::contact, showing only related values starting from Invoices).

I used a New Invoice script to create the invoice, assuming the invoice would have related line-items and therefore wouldn't work in a portal.

Let me know if this helps or if you're still stuck.

Josh

clients.zip

February 24, 200718 yr

I kind of dissagree here, since Josh are storing redundant information here, if an employee is employed by several companies you're issuing invoices to, could it be dealt with that the person is "proscriped" to each company's portal of contacts. Which gives dupes since the allow creation would assign a new ID to the person, but by and large are people only attached to one company by which you issue invoices to ...i guess???

Josh is using a calc to grap company info, but this is a bygone requirement for tunneling related values ...which now "...along the line" can be ushered in correctly.

I can reccomend that both questioner and replier, spend some time with this video:

http://www.filemakermagazine.com/secured/541/GraphRules_full.mov

...to get a better grip on the radical changes arriving with fm7! !!!