Sliding and repeating fields

[davidmorr]

I was just making up a quick solution to a simple problem the other day. I had a list of courses, each with a number of participants (anywhere from 1 to 50). I wanted to be able to enter them in a database so they could be sorted by any of the characeristics of the course (name, date created, location, etc). New entries would be made frequesntly. These sorted lists could then be printed or exported as formatted data.

(I had tried doing this in Excel, but the variable number of participants was beyond me.)

Since it was a quick hack, I created a file with repeating fields for the participants and their phone numbers. The idea was to have a printout that looked like this:

Intro to Computing 20/1/02 Room1 Mary Smith 1234567

Bill Bloggs 9876543

Allen Jones 6532424

Web Design Basics 21/5/02 Room2 Jean Brown 8747534

David Owens 7834688

(Urk! fmforums removes the leading spaces! The idea is to have the course name appear once, then the participants' names appear aligned under each other at the right side of the page.)

The problem came in trying to cope with the varying number of participants. I set up a column layout with the repeating field vertical. Obviously, this was going to mean 50 lines for each course, even though most would only have a few participants.

So I tried setting the repeating fields to slide up, thinking that the layout would adjust its size accordingly. It didn't!

So, two questions:

1. Is it possible to have the layout adjust its length according to the number of non-blank entries in a repeating field?

2. Suggestions as to how to do this simply and quickly?

Thanks

David

[LiveOak]

You really don't want to go down this path. Repeating fields are a hold-over from FM 2.1 and before and shouldn't be used in modern designs. What you really need is a file of Classes (one file for each class) related to a file of Students (one record for each student) by class number. Print your report from a list view in the Student file subsummarized by Class number or Class Name (related field).

-bd