Hello everybody.  I need to create a notes field, and I would like to know the best way to approach this.  (The intent is to have a time stamped record of each interaction with our patients.)

 

Should I have one big field, and rely on the users to timestamp their entries?

 

Or should I have a portal relationship with a related "notes" table, with each new note being a new record?  Is that best?

 

Or is there some better solution?  I imagine this is well trodden ground around here.  Any advice will be appreciated!

If you have just one big field it becomes very tricky to avoid users changing what's already there instead of just adding to it.

I prefer a Notes table.

 (The intent is to have a time stamped record of each interaction with our patients.)

 

if the intent is to use the timestamp at any point - for example, to find the notes for a given date - then of course you'll need a dedicated field for the timestamp and a separate record for each note.

see this link: http://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/web-viewer-notes

One of the problems with having Notes in a single field is that a User can mess it up very easily, changing/deleting other Users' entries.  If you use records for your Notes then you can use Security that a User can only change their own entry.

 

Notes and Comments fields can also get quite large and having those fields in every table can be expensive to download large text blocks to client.  So even if there is only a single Note or Comment for a record, I place them in another 1:1 table to ease download demands.  

 

I use a single Notes table and all tables feed into it. There are many ways to accomplish it depending upon your version.  You can have foreign keys to each of your other tables and use 'allow creation' so they all just create their records in Notes.  You can use a single 'external' foreign key which holds UUID or custom function UUID so all tables use the same key in writing through or you can use scripts to create your Notes records.

 

But regardless the method, sharing a Notes table and a Documents table come in handy and yes I agree completely with Wim that Notes should be records.  

Oh, and once you have your Notes table established, you can display them with the technique mentioned by thong127 if you wish!!

Thank you everybody for the useful thoughts.