Table occurences: When to use them?

July 11, 200817 yr

Hi Everyone,

First off, great community. I'm a newbie and I've been making the transition to FMP from Access and I certainly have enjoyed the change. The solution I'm putting together is coming slowly... But I have run into a few snags:

I have a table called TBJobCost and this has two TO's on my graph: TOOutsourcingCosts and TOTimesheets. I've built layouts that add records with respect to these occurrences. However, when I create a list layout for TOTimesheets, I get all the data in the TBJobCost table.

So, what I need to know:

1. Have I used TO's correctly (Timesheet data and outcourcing data is almost the same hence using the one table)?

2. Should I have split these into two tables?

3. If I have done the right thing by using occurences, do I need a field to differentiate the types on the JobCost table? (I thought the realtionship would handle it (but I might be very mistaken)).

4. How do I only show the data from the TO that I want when in a list view?

I think what I'm trying to do relates to some of the discussions that I have seen on the forum regarding object oriented DB design.

Any thoughts and help would be appreciated.

Regards

George

July 11, 200817 yr

You need to adjust to filemakers methods, and in my humble opinion is nowhere better to start than watching this movie:

http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/graph-rules-four-rules-to-remember.html

...it will answer a myriad of question you obviously must have!

--sd

July 11, 200817 yr

Records belong to a table, not to any one of the table's occurrences. Any TO is capable of showing all records of its base table.

Layouts belong to a TO, but this doesn't limit the records that can be shown using a layout. It DOES limit which RELATED records can be seen from the point-of-view of the layout (only records from relationships that are linked using the layout's TO).

Records created in any layout of a base table are equal - if you have types of record, you must use a field to distinguish between them. Relationships can USE this field to make only certain type available through the relationship. But the filtering is done by the relationship, not by the TO itself.

To show only a certain type of records in a layout of the same table, you need to FIND them. This can be done in one of two ways: by performing a find, or by coming from another TO using the Go to Related Record [show only related records] script step. If the relationship is defined to make only certain type of records related, the result will be a found set of that type only.