First question's always a dumb one...

[phunkidude]

Hi,

I'm getting back into Filemaker after about 10 years and trying to get my head around Tables and how they relate.

I thought I had it figured out until I opened the 'Contact Management' template that comes with FMPro. It seems to do what I want but I wanted to reverse engineer it to understand it.

The main table relates to 3 others called 'Similar Name', 'Similar Company' and 'Similars'. Confusingly though the three 'similar' tables to do not show up in my Table management window, only showing the one table called 'Contact Management'.

How can I edit the related tables if they are not there?

I hope this is clear.

Edited February 11, 2008 by Guest

[phunkidude]

Yeah I'm stupid...

I just figured it out. Would I be right in saying that there is only one table but four instances of it? The table is essentially relating within itself?

[Fenton]

They are "self-relationships", both ends of the relationship are from the same "base table." So editing a related record would be editing the record in the same table. You could use the step Go To Related Record [ portal's relationship ] to go to the record in the portal. Often the fields of such a self-relationship would not be editable. Are they in that template?

[phunkidude]

Well I haven't really tried editing them. I'm just trying to understand what exactly the fields are doing.

Thanks for your help.