I have two tables, one of Event information another for allocation of tickets for the event. In the allocation table, some tickets are gratis and don't count against the total available to the purchaser. I am running a sum of those that do count against the allocated number, but when I try to use that sum it won't instantly recalc., it does at some point after I click around here and there. Is there something I am missing?

Edited February 15, 200718 yr by Guest

Shouldn't this be 3 tables, put the actual price in the join table ...this is one of the places where a joinless many2many not quite are justified!

--sd

At the moment there is no price, just a counter. Adding a third table is an option, but curious as to why that would make the summary work better?

Since you have just two tables, isn't the use of a summary field not quite justified unless a vast amount of tickets needs some kind of statistics.

Please explain why you tend to use summaries over aggregate functions here?

I can't help feeling a lot of the relevant info is left out here. Tickets usually comes with some sort of serial numbers to them as them as attribute (each an idividual record)

Either is this a pretty common question, which is substantially examplified by the tree replying templates here:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/184579/post/240589/hl//

...or it's something where a join table is required to make statistics from???

--sd

I agree it is a little complicated.

The reason this is all done in a table to begin with is that the tickets are sold by table hosts, who are trying to fill their tables. The NPO keeps track of who has more seats to fill, which tables are already full etc. The host's record is the master and the table is the tickets they have sold.

There are two stats I want, one is the total of all tickets (there are four types, but no serial numbers) the total ticket cound is a summary field, works fine.

The second statistic is a little more complicated, as it is the total of only two types of the tickets. For that total I have a calculated field which checks which type the ticket is before summing, giving me a subset of the total. If I set relationships on the ticket types I could get totals that way, but seems excessive, when all I want is a conditional total, and for it to update as tickets are added or the fields change.

I hope that clarifies it a little.

Try to get idea from this template then:

http://www.filemakerpros.com/Percentages.zip

Even though it looks exactly as this:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/attachment.php?attid/9874/

You're probably hessitating less than required, as to where to put the summary fields?? ...Or - could it be you're forgetting the use of:

http://www.filemaker.com/help/FunctionsRef-341.html

--sd