Design Question

[jwolfe11]

I have an application I am working on and here is the problem I'm trying to solve.

I am writing a quote generation application. The user can input items with cost and standard pricing. The set structure is:

Product_Master
|
|-->Product_Child

Product Master has the following fields: Prod_Id, Description and Cost.
Product Child has: Prod_Id, Price, Customer_Id

The reason I have Customer Id is because I want to have the ability to provide standard pricing as well as customer specific pricing for high volume customers. I have an input screen based on a Set designed as follows:

Order_Header
||
||==>Order_Items

I have an embedded browse on the form for order_items. The first field is a lookup on the Product_Master field for the Product. I want Alpha to look to the Product_child database and see if there is a reduced price for this customer and fill it into the appropriate field. If not, fill in the standard price. The customer_id field is used to identify customer specific discounts. Standard pricing has a customer_id of "999".

Am I approaching this correctly? I'm thinking that I have to use calculated fields to input via lookups using the 'Exist' function or something like this. Any ideas on a more elegant approach would be appreciated.

Thanks.....

[CALocklin]

RE: Design Question

This is a rather unusual situation and I didn't take time to build an app to test this but here are my thoughts:

I'm assuming the "cost" in the Master table is actually your cost rather than the standard cost to your customers.

Do a lookup on the child table to fill in the product id and cost IF the person inputting the data would be familiar with the numbers without seeing the description. Then set the default value for the description to be a LookupC() function something like
IF( LookupC( "F", parentform:browse1:prod_id.text, "Descriptf", "Master", "Prod_Id_" ) "", LookupC( "F", parentform:browse1:prod_id.text, "Descriptf", "Master", "Prod_Id_" ), LookupC( "F", "999", "Descriptf", "Master", "Prod_Id_" ))

This basically says this: If the first lookup returns a valid value, use it, otherwise lookup the standard price.

After the user looks up the product id and the cursor enters the description field, the description should fill in automatically. NOTE: be sure to set the default value to fill in automatically at the END of the Enter operation if not previously filled. This will fill in the value even if the user never gets the cursor into that field.

Now that I think about it, it would be just as easy if the user needs to have the description first except the lookup would then be
LookupN( "F", parentform:browse1:prod_id.text, "Pricef", "Child", "Prod_id_")

(If you are wondering about my strange names for the field and index, click here to see my rationale: A5_Naming_Recommendations. I'm even going to add a new reason based on this message.)

[jwolfe11]

RE: Design Question

Thanks Cal. I'll give this a try. I appreciate the time and effort you've given to this. I've been using Alpha products for 15 years and the user community still amazes me.

Thanks again..