Apples to Oranges Advice Sought

[Mitchell Design]

Over the past year, I've been honing my FMP skills creating a solution that tracks the individual components of educational product under development for my employer. The solution tracks as Master Item (the complete, built product as sold) and Component (everything that makes up said Master Item), with components relating back to the master via a generated serial number. The real "tracking" happens on the component level, with the master item acting as a way for all related info to be able to be changed at one time when needed. Works great, with no problems.

In fact, I've done such a wonderful job with it, the Powers That Be want to be able to start tracking other art, print and odd jobs not related to development in the same manner. Here's where I hit the wall...

Several departments will be working with both developmental and non-developmental records. Some won't. Some parts of the data would be similar, some won't. Part of me wants to make a nearly identical solution (duplicated & trimmed down) for tracking the non-developmental stuff away from the product and be done with it.

But then again, the other part of me says I really should put it all together in one place so the departments who do work with both types of data don't need to jump between solutions to get their work done. Add to that, the prospect of trying to get data from two different tables together on one printed report makes me nervous. I know I could do it, but I fear it would be a kludge somehow (keeping in mind, not all of the data is identical). And, could I be creating double work for myself when a "feature" is requested for one solution that needs to be in the other for consistency sake?

I've gone back & forth with this for a good two weeks now, and my deadline is fast approaching. Any advice for a neophyte FMP developer? Many thanks in advance.

[Kurt Knippel]

Unless the basic procedures are radically different (which I doubt, since the same people are doing both) or the necessary data is radically different ( which I also doubt, since you are just dealing with different types of Master Items and Components) I would NOT make parallel systems.

As you have already figured out your work will be more than double.

At the most extreme case, you may want to consider doing some layout tricks to give visual cues as to what kind of record they are working with and to hide unnecessary information, but that is the most.

Stick with one solution.