Calculation that excludes records with a unique value

[Tony H]

Greetings, all. Was curious to see if a calculation could be constructed in which records with a unique field or identifying value could be excluded from the total of the desired result. Specifically, I am creating data drawn from the same table that calculates time periods for milestones that have various phases of work (call these child records). Each milestone period has a single parent, call it a parent record, that represents the totality of time assigned to all milestones within that parent group. Presently, my calculation shows all time-related data, including the time assigned to the parent and the children (which means that the calculated value is inaccurate because it shows more time allocated than actually is because it adds the time fields of both the parent and child records). I want to exclude the data assigned to the parent and just show the time periods assigned to the child records. My parent records already have a unique value in a single field. Thanks, all.

Edited July 16, 2008 by Guest
Clarity

[LaRetta]

Well, without seeing your structure - the key would be to use 'not equal' from the parentID to the self-join ParentID. This will pull all values but itself. You can include this join criteria with other criteria in the relationship, such as date greater than or equal to and date less than to narrow your results.

Edited July 16, 2008 by Guest

[comment]

This is very confusing. Why are parent records in the same table as the child records? And even if they are, and they hold the total time of their children - wouldn't that be in a separate calculation field? It seems it should be easy to summarize either the alloted time (which would be empty for a parent record) or the parent's total time (which would be empty for a child record) - the result would be the same for both.