Duplicating all the items in an order

[Angus McKinnon]

I'm working on an invoicing database just now which is, on the surface, relatively straightforward. There is a table of customers, a table of orders, and a table of order items. 

At the moment, when someone calls in with an order, the user looks up the customer, then creates a new order for them as a related record in the order table. That layout has a portal which allows the user to create line items for that order.

When I've been chatting with users, the number one request has been some way to duplicate orders. Some customers order the same list of items over and over again and it's irritating to have to duplicate manually. (We have value lists etc. to save typing but all the same it's a relatively cumbersome and time consuming task - I can totally see where they're coming from.)

I can think of a few ways to make this happen, but frankly they all feel like bodges - some sort of script that goes through all the related records from the Source order, duplicates them, and sets the link field in the new record to Destination order. I'm not sure if there's a more elegant way to get this done - does anyone have any suggestions?

[Angus McKinnon]

I'm revisiting this older post to share the solution I've found. 

Basically, the easiest way to duplicate all the related items is a looping script which works through each related item record in turn, duplicates it, and sets the link field appropriately. When I first asked the question I wasn't familiar with using variables, which is much more elegant than using global fields as I'd first imagined would be necessary. 

There is a far better description of the process here:

https://www.filemaker.tv/uncategorized/filemaker-duplicate-invoice/

[Aussie John]

Not sure I understand wouldn’t you just;

copy ID to a variable

go to orders table 

find using the variable

duplicate

set date

return to portal