showing one (single) address under contacts

[achtung515]

Hello - First thanks for taking the time to offer your input.  I appreciate it.

I am a novice to filmmaker but have spent a great deal of time researching it and studying it.  I have built a couple "trial" databases.
 

I am now working on a database to hold all of my real estate business information.  For the problem situation at hand I have three tables I am looking at: Contacts, property Address, and a jointable for them.  

I would like the home address or mailing address to be supplied on my contact cards.  But many contacts will be linked to many different properties.  So I am assuming I will want a field dictating which property is a "home address" in the property address table.  Then I am sure I can dictate to only show the address on the contact card that has that field populated with that value (dictating home address).  

I think i am on the right path there.  My question really lies within the reverse.  If I am on a contact card and I want to populate a home address and have it populate in the address table and be marked with home address in that field, will file maker do this on its own, when i populate the field on contact card?  

[comment]

I am not sure I understand your question that well, but I do understand this:

 

So I am assuming I will want a field dictating which property is a "home address" in the property address table.

 

No, that is not the correct approach. If a contact can have only one property selected as the "home address" property, then this selection is an attribute of a contact and should be recorded in a field of the Contacts table, say Contacts::HomePropertyID.

 

Once you have that, you can show the selected property's address on the contact's layout either by defining an auxiliary relationship :

 

Contacts::HomePropertyID = Properties 2::PropertyID

 

and getting the address from there, or by filtering a portal based on the existing relationships.

[achtung515]

Makes sense.   Thank you - much easier.

 

One thing i have learned thus far, is it is very easy to completely over think it.  

 

I don't fully understand what the purpose of the auxiliary relationships are?  Why wouldn't I just pull that info from the primary property table?  I can even do that without a portal, right?

[comment]

I don't fully understand what the purpose of the auxiliary relationships are?  Why wouldn't I just pull that info from the primary property table?  I can even do that without a portal, right?

 

The best way to understand why this won't work would be to try it, I think. Then you would see that, without a portal, any field from Properties placed on a layout of Contacts will show data from the first related record in Properties. This is not necessarily the record of the property selected as the "home address" property for this contact.

[achtung515]

The best way to understand why this won't work would be to try it, I think. Then you would see that, without a portal, any field from Properties placed on a layout of Contacts will show data from the first related record in Properties. This is not necessarily the record of the property selected as the "home address" property for this contact.

 

Thank you - I know these questions must seem silly to some people... So I really appreciate you taking the time to answer them.

[LaRetta]

Questions are not silly.  We all must go through this process of testing and questioning and studying.   Ignorance is not stupid and you are trying to understand the principles beneath.  Good on you.  

[comment]

LaRetta took the words right out my mouth. Actually, that's not true: she said it much better than I was going to.

 

 

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Is that the cat/bat/Yoda again?

[LaRetta]

Indeed it is!  I had missed the little critter's spirit!