basic find question

[LivingRoutes]

Hi, I'm new to filemaker from mysql and am having trouble translating my knowledge. I have two tables (people and emails) in a one to many relationship. I have a primary_email field in the people table to identify which email is their primary one (duh), but can't figure out how to show only this email address in a people-centric layout. In MySQL I would select the entry from email table that has email_ID=primary_email. Is there a way to mimic this in filemaker? Thanks.

[David Jondreau]

I'm a little unclear on the primary_email field idea. Regardless, to make the relationship I would use the following fields.

E-mail table:

1) _kf_idPerson (which would be the id of the person who owns the e-mail address)

2) _k_PrimarySecondary (a field indicating whether the e-mail was primary or not, would have a value of "Primary" or "Secondary", etc.).

People table:

1) _kp_idPeople (auto entered serial number that is the person's numeric id)

2) _kg_Primary (a global calculation = "Primary" with a text result)

Then your relationship would be

_kf_idPeople = _kp_idPeople and

_k_PrimarySecondary = _kg_Primary

[LivingRoutes]

The primary field idea is to identify which email address is a person's primary address, because we may have 2 or 3 addresses on file for them. I'd like to display only the primary address on a layout summarizing personal info (there's no need to list all the email addresses we have). I understand the relationships needed to associate these two entities, but I don't know how to get filemaker to do what I want -- show the email address on the people layout.

[mr_vodka]

I would actually do it a slightly different way.

E-mail table:

_kp_EmailID (auto-serial)

_kf_PersonID

EmailAddress

People table:

1) _kp_PersonID (auto serial)

2) _kf_EmailMain

There is obviously two relationships here. One would be from People::_kp_PersonID to Email::_kf_PersonID. This would show all the related email addresses. I would show all of them in a portal.

Then I would have a button on the portal that would simply set the _kf_EmailMain to whatever EmailID of the related record would be.

Set Field [ People::_kf_EmailMain; RelatedEmails::_kp_EmailID ] (where RelatedEmails is what the name of the Table occurence would be called to display all related emails.

You can then have a second relationship from this People::_kf_EmailMain to the _kp_EmailID of a NEW table occurence. Lets call this MainEmail. So the relationship would be keyed on People::_kf_EmailMain to MainEmail::_kp_EmailID

Now you can just put the Email field from the related MainEmail TO on the person layout and it will display the primary email.

[LivingRoutes]

Ahhh.. Thank You. As I'm new to filemaker I'm also new to 'Table Occurrences'. Adding a new TO to relate emails to people via the primary_email key did the trick. Again, Thank You.