Another way to search?

[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 the number of unduplicated volunteers for the month out of that years' worth of volunteers).

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!

[RussBaker]

How about making a layout with a couple of sub-summaries (no body) on it. The first would be a sub summary when sorted by month, then the second as a sub summary sorted by contact ID. When sorted, in Preview mode, you would then see a list of each month and all the volunteer IDs or names for that month. Use the GetSummary calculation if you want to get the actual numbers of volunteer names for the month.