I've struggled with what is likely a very simple issue now for days and am hoping that someone here may have a few minutes to assist. Screen grab below is a simplified version of basic relationship I'm struggling with.

I have a match field (FID) in the 3 sub-tables to the left. On creating a new record in any one of these tables, I want the table I am working in to:

1)automatically create a unique serial number in the FID field in the Feature Index table on the right. This a serial number/match field

2)via a relationship, have this serial number in the Feature Index table inserted into the sub-table that called the new record.

Does this make sense? I can kind of do it with a drop down box and value list with buttons, but eventually there will be thousands of records in this database and many of which are imported from spreadsheets provided by colleagues. These records will be imported directly into the sub-tables. I just want to ensure that a new record with the same serial number is created in the index table at the same time!

I've tinkered and searched and frankly have no idea how to make this happen. Any quick tips, at least on what I should be looking for??

Thanks

Since you're on fm9, isn't event triggers of much use to you, and you need to investigate this instead:

http://www.databasepros.com/FMPro?-DB=resources.fp5&-lay=cgi&-format=list.html&-FIND=+&resource_id=DBPros000128

But by and large could the attempted normalization be regarded as less convincing ... but again it could be a weak ability to recognize pure genius on my behalf??

But you might get around it by having a type attribute in the 3 leftmost tables joined into one single:

http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/data-tagging-classification-vs-organization.html

--sd