Organizing Relationships

[sicSRT8]

What is the "Best" way to organize your relationships in the graph? Anyone have examples? I would love to get a cleaner look to my graphs and was curious to see how others do theirs.

[Søren Dyhr]

Anchor bouy!

--sd

[comment]

There is no best way to organize the relationships graph (and anchor/buoy is certainly not it).

See:

http://developer.filemaker.com/content/technet/pdf/approaches_to_graph_modeling_en.pdf

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/196775/

[David Jondreau]

"Best" is (an obviously) relative term. Once you work with a tool for a while you get a sense of "what works best for you". I like a loose anchor buoy and I sometimes use functional table occurrence groups, sometimes I mix things up a little depending on what I"m trying to accomplish. I use the "Party Model" for contact management which means utilizing the useful "bi-directionality" of FM relationships.

Some of the issues that A-B tries to solve are just naming conventions, IMHO. But some are useful in and of themselves.

Whatever choice you make for managing your data structure and table occurrences, Filemaker does provide some useful tools.

I create "text areas" behind all my TOs and comment the groups. Then I comment smaller sections with the same tool. I line them up and make them the same length with the Align Left and Resize tools. I close them all down to single headings. I try to lay them out in a rough square.

I'll post a shot when I get to my work machine tomorrow.

PS Just re-read that White Paper. I'd forgotten about it. It is an excellent perspective. Thanks for posting comment! I think a lot of people lump all organizing strategies into spider or A-B, when there's really a spectrum in which A-B isn't even on one end.

Edited October 2, 2009 by Guest