Database for time calculation

[anjadynes]

Hi. I am setting up a database for sailboat rental to calculate time at a certain rate, with one field for culmative time for each sailboat. I had it set up in excel like this:

DATE DAY FROM TO TIME USED CULMATIVE

The culmative time being a calculating field that would calculate the whole time the boat was out for a certain period, say, a month.

Transferring this out to filemaker has been a headache; I know I have to think "outside the box" but I'm having trouble with that field. FYG I used the time sheet template to start with and am changing field names within, deleting fields I don't need. Any help with the culmative field would be appreciated.

[danjacoby]

Are you renting for part of a day, or for some number of days?

Note that date fields actually use a number to represent the actual date (for instance, today, [March 21, 2001], is 730565, whereas tomorrow will be 730566). So you can subtract the "date from" from the "date to" in a calc field that returns a number; that will show the number of days.

Time fields are based on the number of seconds since midnight. So 1:00 a.m. is 3600, noon is 43200, 5:30 p.m. is 63000, etc. You can create a calc field that equals "time to" minus "time from" and returns a time.

HTH,

Dan

P.S. There's no such word as "culmative"; the correct word is "cumulative". Pedantic of me, I know, but there it is.

[BobWeaver]

See this topic:

http://www.fmforums.com/ubb/Forum45/HTML/000150.html

The calculation I posted there will give you a days and hours result. Note that it calculates full days. That is, if the period starts at 11:00pm March 21, and finishes at 1:00am March 22, the duration would be 0 days, 2 hours. Since car rentals log time this way I'm assuming sailboat rentals work the same way.