the old students to classes m-m relationship issue, but create in portal

[Riley Waugh]

HI all,

I have been away for a few years. Now am back to useing Filemaker and jumping to FM10. I feel like I am starting all over again. Nice to see so many familiar names in the posts! So, here is my issue:

I have "Clients" table. I have a "Siblings" table.

Clients have siblings and SOME of these may be clients (by virtue of being minors with a parent in prison).

I use a portal viewed in the "Clients" table layout to enter siblings (and create records of siblings in the "siblings" table).

Based on operator/enterer decision (i.e. a minor and with the same incarcerated parent), a field, we'll call "SibClient", in the portal is checked which indicates the sibling will also be a client. I have the field set to run a script on field modification... the script creates a new "Client" record for the sibling and sets various fields to minimize data entry.

So far, so good (though perhaps not the easiest or best method). but, here's the rub:

I want client A's record to show all siblings (cients or not) in the portal wherein the records are created. I also want Client A's sibling's record, we'll call client B, to show all Client B's siblings (including client A and other siblings who may or may not be clients).

I don't know if this makes sense. I don't know if I should:

1. make ALL siblings create records in the "Client" table and code them as clients or not.

2. Use a Join table of some sort.

3. Buy a few books on Filemaker 10 and catch up.

I will do #3, but I want to finish this little file to show to a colleague to convince her to get away from Excel as an answer to all data storage issues. AnY help is appreciated.

[Matthew F]

Rather than a Clients and Siblings table, why not have a 'Person' table and indicate whether they are clients with a checkbox. You would then create a many-to-many relationship between persons using a join table. You can call the join table 'siblings' if you like, but it is simply a means of joining relatives together rather than a place to store the primary data. The Siblings table simply contains two fields (ID.sib1 an ID.sib2). You would put two instances of the Persons table in your relationship graph and join them both to the Siblings table, like this...

Persons1::ID = Siblings::ID.sib1

Persons2::ID = Siblings::ID.sib2