People and Families

[ghettocottage]

I am currently working on updating a database that has a "People" table. This contains address, numbers, some comments and of course, the persons first and last name.

Simple enough; however, over the years, the folks using this database have often added family members to the first name field.

For example, one record might say "Pete and Linda" on the first name..then the rest of the fields are filled in normally.

The problem I am running into with this is that sometimes one of the people listed will be in a course (this is an outdoor sports school)..so now we have listed "Pete and Linda" instead of just Pete for a class coming up.

My first thought was to just parse out the names, create new records for each individual, and be done with it, but then I started wondering if there are some creative ways to list more than one person within a People record but have them show up as individuals when adding them to a course.

Has anyone encountered a similar situation? If so, how did you deal with this? I am starting to think I am over-complicating things, but then again, someone often comes up with really amazing ways to handle these little glitches in Filemaker, so I thought I would ask. Thanks,,

[Drew Sanderson]

You are on the right track separating each person. You could create a join table to define that people belong to each other. Take a look at the example file. Hope this helps.

example.fp7.zip

Edited July 13, 2009 by Guest

[ghettocottage]

So what I have done for this situation is just parse out the names of the people from each record and create new records for these people. Then, I created a "Groups" table and set that up to allow creation of new groups and label them each as "Family", or "Friends" or "Company" or whatever. There is also a join table between Groups and people. This way you can add as many people to each group as you want, and add a person to as many groups as you want. It seems to be a very workable solution so far. I am ironing out the small details now.

I took this more elaborate solution (as opposed to just doing a self join that looks up similars) because I want to be able to register an entire group for courses that are part of the same database. So you can create a group, add people (or create new people to add) and then register that same group for a course, all from the same spot.

Yay filemaker!

Edited July 29, 2009 by Guest

[Drew Sanderson]

Sounds like you are flying now... glad to hear it!

Best,

Drew