Help with POS System - one to many

[overrider]

Hello all,

i am currently working on a Point of Sale System for a small Bar. The Problem is that i need to provide some sort of Inventory for the Drink Items. Its easy, if you purchase a 30 Liter Barrel of Beer, and then sell them out in 0.3 or 0.5 Liter Glasses, but my Problem lies within Items such as say, Vodka Cola, that consist out f.e 20ml Vodka and 250ml Cola. What i need is, when i enter a Vodka Cola Item into my Sales Order, it can show me the consumption for both Vodka, and Cola. For now, i added a recipe table to my Item Table, that displays the "linked" items and their units required, but thats where my wits stopped. How do i get these Items for Cola and Vodka into my Sales Table when i entered in the Item Vodka-Cola?

Can anyone give me some suggestions to reach what i need?

Thanks and best regards,

Overrider

[Søren Dyhr]

It's more or less the same thing we had up yesterday in this thread:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/192581/post/278585/#278585

The genuine recursive structure is way to go - the safe bet, but there is a shortcut with a price to pay, but if you only need to compile the correct ingredients with measures, and disregarding the availability of the combinations of ingredients. If the tradeoff seems OK for the present situation could the DW Dataconcepts approach be used.

Perhaps if you could narrow down the posibilities for various interpretations of this a little:

it can show me the consumption for both Vodka, and Cola.

It's more "know when" than "know how" it's easier to establish lacks in the storage when the combination have been separated out in ingrediences.

But if you feel yourself sufficiently clad for recursive structures, shouldn't you spend too much time considering the "cheat" ...

by rushing to:

http://jonathanstark.com/recursive_data_structures.php

...and then to:

http://www.jonathanstark.com/downloads.php#inventory_example

--sd

[overrider]

Hello there,

thank you for your reply. I will read the Article you linked tomorrow and download the Example File as well.

As for narrowing down:

I have three Items in my Items Table: Beer, Cola, and a Mixed Drink, called "Diesel". Diesel consists out of half Beer and half Cola.

On my Sales order,

i sell 1 Beer 0.3 Liter

i sell 1 Cola 0.3 Liter

i sell 1 Diesel 0.3 Liter

Now on my Sales Reports, which i hope to generate from my Sales Table, it should show me that not only i consumed 0.3 Liter Beer, Cola and Diesel, but also that i consumed 0.15 Liter Cola and 0.15 Liter Beer to make up that one Diesel. Additionally, i would like to have it so that when i sell 1 Diesel, it also deducts 0.15 Liter Cola and 0.15 Liter Beer from my Items Inventory.

I know i run into issues with all these different Units that could show up, Liters, Cans of Cola and such, but i will stick to Liters for the Units of all my Drink Items. I have a table related to each Item where you can enter in the related Items used to make up one Drink such as:

Item ID : 101

Name : Diesel

Unit 0.3

Related Table :

Linked Item ID : 102

Name : Cola

Unit : 0.15

Linked Item ID : 103

Name : Beer

Unit : 0.15

i hope this can give more insight to what i am planning to do,

Thanks and best regards,

Overrider

[Søren Dyhr]

You noticed that I distinguished between when and how, reporting is in my book based on historic events, where a certain way of slicing and dicing is the case ... done on occations say efter the opening hours.

This means you can go ahead with the "cheat", because each use of an ingredient is split out to it's own line in the itemsline, where the summary repoting is going on on demand.

--sd