Checkbox sets

[Wrighty]

HELP!!

FM Dev 7

Have a database with some 70 different customers and some 2900 records that include data such as Country, Type of operation, Process, Equipment, Model number and a few others. Items such as Equipment, Model number, Process may have multiple records for each piece of equipment.

What I'm trying to acheive by having a 'Checkbox Set' of Customer Names and another 'Checkbox Set' with various pieces of equipment and having someone select either one or more customers from the list and have these records 'found' in a list format with all the relevant information.

I need to do the same with the 'Equipment' list and find all the relevant information such as the customers with that type of Equipment.

I'm stuck with identifying which chechboxes have been selected in the 'Checkbox Set' Is there a way of acheiving this???

[Ender]

Greetings Wrighty,

You won't have very good flexibility with a checkbox set (and it's not really appropriate to have large sets of checkboxes anyway).

You should restructure your solution to use three tables: Equipment, Customer, and Assigned Equipment (Equipment-Customer join). With this, you can use portals to add join records to the Assigned Equipment, and once those are in place, run reports showing which Customers have which Equipment.

[Vaughan]

Checkboxes become less than optimal when there are a large number of options -- where I'd define "large" as more than 20. For a couple of hundred items, they won't be very useable and they might not even fit on the screen.

Portals are good for selecting large option sets, particularly when combined with a "type-ahead" field where part of a keyword can be entered and matching values are displayed.

There are some demos around, take a look.

[Wrighty]

Thanks Ender - Thanks Vaughan

Well, at least you have pointed me in the right direction - checkbox sets look good insofar as seeing all 70 customers on one screen (in 3 columns). I'll work on portals until I hit a snag ....... then maybe you could assist once again

Ta :