I am building a new version of my rental & production business database in FMP 8. I will be importing data from my current FMP4 database and I would like to make some widely recommended changes in the relationship linking structure. I currently have separate files for Orders, Purchase Orders, Companies ( be they customers or vendors ), Venues ( where orders such as concerts or meetings take place or are delivered to ) and People ( who can work at either Companies or Venues ). Orders, People and Purchase orders relate to Companies and Venues by a link that is hand entered when that Company or Venue is created and is a contraction of the entities' name. I would like to change this relationship link to one based on the record serial number but since I have ten years of records and 1000s of orders, companies and people all with existing links and existing record serial numbers to relink I'd like to ask for a bit of guidance on the best way to approach this.

Thanks for any suggestions

Hi Riley

The structure here could be, what is known as Subtype/Supertype model, which is lively debated in this thread:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/198682/pid/344070/post/last/m/1/

However have Fenton brought some useful templates to this in the thread here:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/194886/post/288910/hl/%22David+Graham%22/fromsearch/1/#288910

--sd