Can a relationship solve this?

[mtoth14]

Howdy folks,

So I'm wrangling with an issue that I suspect a relationshipcould solve, but I can't quite figure it out. It's with a database that tracks outreach instances and volunteers.

For each Outreach, there are many Outreach Volunteers; both of these are viewed through a navigation database that has a one-to-one relationship with both of these, called Main_Outreach (which is a holding tank of all globals and no actual data).

In any given month, I need to determine a total number of volunteers for the month. BUT!

Because of our contract, I need to find only the unduplicated volunteers for the length of the contract year (so if the contract is a calendar-year one, and I'm determining

Now in FileMaker 4.1, if I simply omit duplicate volunteer IDs during a search, it omits every instance of the duplicated volunteer, and I can't report on the first time they did an outreach. So far I've been sorting by ID and hand-omitting multiple instances after the first, but this is clearly not a favorable solution. If I'm, say, trying to report on volunteers for April, I have to:

1. Search for the contract period through the end of April

2. Sort by Contact ID

3. Hand-omit all but the 1st instance of someone's outreach activity

4. Re-sort by date

5. See who's left in April and count them by hand

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!