Complete beginner to layouts..

[DaveHunt1979]

Hi guys, hope you can help and point me in the right direction, ive been using filemaker for a few years but never created anything. well now its time for me to create a little print management system. Basically i have started creating a contact detail page which is fine, saves nice and lists them out lovely. But what i want to do is add a button by each contact and if they bring a new job (which they do) i want to click on that button and it open up my job bag layout which ive created and it fill in all the relevant details. now this may seem really easy to you guys, but i am struggling. I thought i would pick this up really easy as ive coded visual basic and director lingo in the past. cheers davr

[milanm]

I would do it like this: make a separate table for that "Job bag" to hold the various jobs related to the specific contact. Relate those two tables with an UI key (Unique Identifier) field and a child key in the Jobs bag table. Than create the Job bag layout on the basis of the appropriate related table. Then you could create a button that is creating a new job (new record in the job bag table) related to the specified contact by placing a similar value in the UI key child related field of the job bag table. It will automaticaly drag all the existing values from the contact table, if you need them copied for some reason inside the Job table you could do this by putting a simple calculation inside the fields or use "Look up" feature which is not recommended for years, but still is there.

If you need to sort out any other value that does not exist at the time you are appointing the job, you could do it by "Set variable" script steb, Auto Enter feature, or manually. 

[Rick Whitelaw]

Milanm,

There are some very valid reasons for using a lookup and they're not likely to go away which is why the feature still exists. An example would be a table that produces cheques. Each time a cheque record is created it looks up the address of the payee. That way each cheque has the address current at the time of issue. There are many more reasons to use a lookup. I avoided lookups for a long time until I finally saw their utility.

RW.

[DaveHunt1979]

Thank you very much I will have a play with that over the weekend. I was trying to find out if there was a way of copying a layout from one FM12 file to another. I can import the data but it just lists all my tables and loses all the formatting. But that will be my next trick and plea for help!!

 

Dave