I'm a FM noob...so I apologize beforehand.  Trying to learn as I develop my database.

 

I'm developing a contact management database.  The majority of the database is typical.  The part I'm having difficulty regards a recurring 'event.'

 

I want to be able to have a set of fields that show date, time, contact type (follow-up, 1st contact, etc), and notes that can be searched.  This set of fields needs to be able to be repeated infinitely so that I can add a new field each time I contact them.  It needs to be able to search and do reports on my database...such as search for contacts with last follow-up greater than 2 months ago.

It seems like what you want is an Events table, related to your contact by a primary key. They can be viewed by portal, and even searched via portal (portal searches by definition take longer, but if you don't have truly stupendous amounts of data, it should be acceptable). This way, you can create a new Events record for each time you contact them.

 

For example, from what you described above, to start with you'd need five fields in your Events table: Contact Key (the primary key of your Contact table, or whatever it's called), Contact Type (as you described above), Date, Time, Notes.

 

You can create a portal that allows you to create new records, OR you can create a new related record via script.

 

As for the search example you provided, you could perform a search in the portal Date field that omits records where Date > [2 months ago]

 

The way portal searches work, if you have a record with three Events in it, and even one of them has a Date > [2 months ago], the entire Contacts record will be omitted from the search result. Don't try to search the other way (Date < [2 months ago]), because it will return any and all Contact records with an old Event record in the portal.

 

I hope that makes sense, please don't hesitate to ask any more questions! Good luck!

Thanks...that helps a lot.  I'm muddling through it now.  We'll see how the end result turns out!