Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Many to Many relationships

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Many to Many relationships

    I have been using FM for years now testing out Alpha5 , they said they support many to many relationships (had to build a transactional database to do this in filemaker) but the only options I see are one to one or one to many. In my project many apartments relate to many people and many people relate to many apartments. Whats the best way yo accomplish this in Alpha5?

    thnx
    N

    #2
    Re: Many to Many relationships

    Originally posted by nfreed View Post
    they said they support many to many relationships
    You lost me there.

    Here's the documentation on

    Creating Sets with Many to Many links
    There can be only one.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Many to Many relationships

      Use a third table as a join or link table. At the very least you need fields in this third table to hold the primary key from the Apartment table and the Persons table. In addition to these fields you would add any fields that describe the relationship between the two.

      Then build sets using these three tables to accomplish how you want to work with the data.
      To see persons at an apartment you would have the apartmnet table as parent linked 1:M to the join table and then the join table linked 1:1 to the persons table.
      To see the apartments that a person has lived in or may be currently renting you would have the Person table as parent linked 1:M to the join table and then the join table linked 1:1 to the Apartment table.

      EDIT
      PS I agree with Stan re: who said what about what. :)

      And welcome to the message board.
      Tim Kiebert
      Eagle Creek Citrus
      A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Many to Many relationships

        Thanks guys thats the same way as filemaker pretty much , oh and to clarify for calrifications sake transactional database = join or link table

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Many to Many relationships

          Thanks for the clarification. I was puzzled how you could do a transactional database in FM, as it has no transactional semantics whatever. I'm basically in your position - having used FM for a while, we're looking to move and are evaluating Alpha Five.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Many to Many relationships

            Have u looked at AwareIm looks like a viable option seems like a similar product at first glance. Im doing a 30 day trial of Alpha5 now then Im going to do one with AwareIm

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Many to Many relationships

              Originally posted by nfreed View Post
              Have u looked at AwareIm looks like a viable option seems like a similar product at first glance. Im doing a 30 day trial of Alpha5 now then Im going to do one with AwareIm
              AwareIM seems a great choice of "several apps in one" if you can live with very limited choices of layout and do not want to customise your apps to any significant degree. It does not look like you have much in the way of tools to custom-write your own apps though, esp industry specific appliances that do not fit the common mould. Looks great though for the most part.

              Personally with solutions like those, even free frameworks, I always find while it does some of the work for you there are always a few very significant options for customisation totally lacking in these, but options that are a "must" for that particular app. Even with Alpha5v9 there were some things that prohibited me from using it fully, but with v10 this is no longer the case :)

              It looks like if you want a slightly customisable out of the box solution then AwareIM is your product to choose but all the controls etc I can see in the demo samples on their site are there in Alpha5... I guess it really depends whether you just want a customisable out of the box solution or whether you want to develop something with full control over all elements.
              Last edited by NoeticCC; 10-30-2009, 06:14 PM.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Many to Many relationships

                Noah,

                Give it a good run and you will be back to Alpha after because of the ability to do so much that you won't be able to do in the others.

                and

                Welcome aboard here.
                Dave Mason
                [email protected]
                Skype is dave.mason46

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Many to Many relationships

                  Thanks for the advice guys this is really a great forum!!!
                  The aware im people say u can get into the code of what u produce and do programming if u want to extend the functionality and u can use their html editor or use work u import from whichever one u favor. So to me that seems flexible but frankly I don't really know anything about web programming so I'm wondering if I'm missing something important? Any advice appreciated

                  thnx

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Many to Many relationships

                    Originally posted by Stan Mathews View Post

                    Here's the documentation on

                    Creating Sets with Many to Many links
                    I think Alpha's definition of many to many is mistaken:

                    A many-to-many set is created by defining a linking table that has one-to-many relationships with two different tables.

                    Many to many as I understand it is where the parent & child have a mutual reciprocal relationship:

                    A [1:M] B
                    B [1:M] A

                    Usually affected by a 3rd intermediary table consisting of two linking keys, one for each table.
                    Peter
                    AlphaBase Solutions, LLC

                    [email protected]
                    https://www.alphabasesolutions.com


                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Many to Many relationships

                      Not sure I understand your point/question/issue Peter. Many-to-many is not directly supported and the caveat is defined

                      Alpha Five does not support forms or browses that will display data from this type of set. However, you can use Xbasic routines to read from and write to the set.
                      but the result is usable as if there were many-to-many links.

                      Is there a comparable solution with a database that does support actual many to many links?
                      There can be only one.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Many to Many relationships

                        Originally posted by Stan Mathews View Post
                        Not sure I understand your point/question/issue Peter.
                        Stan, I'm not in disagreement w. you, just Alpha's definition as I quoted. Furthermore, the graphic they show has nothing to do w. many to many, rather one to many/many. Just don't want someone to get confused by Alpha's definition (and graphic).
                        Peter
                        AlphaBase Solutions, LLC

                        [email protected]
                        https://www.alphabasesolutions.com


                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Many to Many relationships

                          I was curious and also downloaded aware im. They have a CRM application with a calendar control that can be integrated into applications without programming. The program crashed when I tried to open the trial however. The cost is almost twice the price of Alphafive.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Many to Many relationships

                            Yeah, nothing does what alpha lets you do.

                            Comment

                            Working...
                            X