Hello folks,

I'm developing a simple relational database as a student assistant on my college campus. I have a database set up with 4 tables.

In short, its for a disciplinary action department on the campus. everything stems from the incident tables. One incident can have one or many charges, and one or many sanctions.

From a layout perspective, I can't figure out how to allow input for multiple charges and multiple sanctions. And then search for an incident and have it display those multiple charges and sanctions.

Does anyone have experience with a situation like this, or am i making any sense? ;)

It sounds like you have a good start; 4 tables: Student -> Incident, then 2 children tables of Incident: Charges and Sanctions. On an Incident layout, you can choose the Student. You can also show a portal to Charges, with "Allow creation of related records", and similar to Sanctions.

Back up the relational chain, you can show a portal to Incidents on the Student layout (if you have one), then jump to a particular Incident in the portal, with a button in the row.

What you cannot have is a portal with Incidents on the Student table, including portals to the other 2 tables inside of it; there is no "portal within a portal" capability.

Update and some questions...

I created one layout linked to the incident table but the bottom half of the layout also allows for entry of the charges at the same time. If i want to add data into the charges table at the same time, do i need a portal for eahc value?

the same goes for a second layout i created for sanctions. There are fields on the sanction layout that also go into the incident table.

Things are structured this way because of how the user receives the information.

Lastly, when creating relationships in FMP...If i have a 1-M relationship from the incident to charge table, do i create the incident table's primary key field in the charge table and then just connect them? In software like rational rose, if you create a relationship between two tables the foreign key is automatically moved into the many side table