Hello everyone;

I am trying to figure out my relationships based on my bakery model and we have a lot of niche products.

here is a screenshot of my relationships( which i am certain are not anchor buoy)

I would like to know how can i start this off so i dont get trapped with a maze of confusing TO & TOG's that make no sense.

any help would be awesome.

The problem i am already seeing is i have to enable pull aparts, suites & cakes to "Allow creation of records" while using a layout based on line items table based on dept_ID & dept_fk.

ProductID is connected to LIneItems with product_fk.

how can i get this neater from the start?

Hi Imoree,

I noticed your post with no feedback for half a month... but your question is the kind of question I've been puzzling over, so I did some reading. I'm pretty much a novice, but it sounds to me like you've got the answer right there in your question: use Anchor-Buoy design and TOG's to keep things straight.

I learned about Anchor Buoy in the Filemaker Training Series module 3, "Data Modeling"... but I didn't know what it was until I saw your post, searched, and found the Six Fried Rice page called "Six Fried Rice Methodology Part 2 – Anchor Buoy and Data Structures" . Between those two sources, with the TO naming convention used in both of them, it sounds like the Anchor-Buoy method can keep relationship insanity at bay...

Like I said, I'm no expert, but I'm working on similar problems, so I hope this helps.

Thanks

tzf

Actually, his post is over a year old.

Ha! So it is, Lee! I noted the date but not the year. So I guess I was no help at all... c'est la vie!

Anchor-buoy is merely a way of developing with FMP. It is not a substitute for good data analysis and relational design.

I'm not a fan of a-b myself.

Good to know, Vaughan, would you care to elaborate or point me at some relevant article on alternative methods for structuring TO's and their relationships in FMP? I'm very interested in this topic.

Here is a link to an "Approaches to Graph Modeling" whitepaper: https://fmdev.filemaker.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1113-2-1172/approaches_to_graph_modeling_en.pdf

One of the downsides to Anchor-buoy is it creates more table occurrences than other methods, and over WAN that means there is more data that needs to be cached.

The other thing I've found with a-b is that the TO graph conveys little information about the relationships between tables. Which means that the e-r information needs to be documented somewhere else... and frequently it is not.