Hello, I am new to Filemaker and really my brain just doesn't seem to work well for this sort of thing. I am trying to set up a database to track documents in an archival collection. We need to track each thing for intellectual property permissions/copyright. We need to be able to enter in item info, like what it is, whether it's under copyright etc, along with the authors, and publishers information. From what I understand this is a many to many relationship (each document can have several authors and/or publishers and each publisher and author can have several documents). I'm not even sure I set up my tables properly and then there is the larger question of how do I make data entry as easy as possible?! Is it pretty much necessary to use scripts? Is there any way of having entry fields on one layout for multiple tables?

Important things for this are also that the author and publisher IDs are being generated by FM so mean nothing outside of the database. Some items will have publisher and no authors and some will have authors and no publishers. Some will have both. Some will have neither.

I appreciate any help you experts can give me. I attached a relationship graph to demo where I've been going with this.

relationshipgraph.pdf

Edited June 13, 200718 yr by Guest

The table and relationship graph setup looks correct.

It might be an advantage to combine authors and publishers tables in one table persons. Then you would need two tables less and could distinguish authors and publishers in a data field in the connecting table item_persons.

Think of persons who act both as publisher and as author. It would be inconvenient in my eyes to have two records in different tables for those persons.

Data input can be organized on the item layout in two portals. One for authors and one for publishers.

jens

Really?? I could add authors from the items table using a portal???

My main problem seems to be in being able to create my people publisher records from the main data entry page. Would anyone be willing to take a look at my filemaker file to give a hand? I have a feeling it's something really simple...

IPtracking.fp7.zip

Edited June 14, 200718 yr by Guest
to upload filemaker file

Nobody can help you because you've password protected it and have not mentioned the password.