Design help

[John Dodson]

I am venturing into new and uncharted Alpha territory :) and need some guidance.

I need to build a individualized �activity plan� for clients. I have a one-to-many set of Clients to Activities. I have another �master table� of Activities. I would like to display a form, (either when adding clients or after they have been added), that would also build the activity plan. So, the form would show client data and one embedded browse to the linked activities that make up the individual �plan� to be added, And another embedded browse showing the �master table� of activities to choose from. My current plan is to us OnDoubleclick with both browses � one to append records from the master Activity table to the child activity table and the other to delete activities from the child table � thus building an �activity plan�.

My questions are: is this a good approach? Can I use Action scripting or must I code pieces of Xbasic (of which I have limited experience)? Do you know of any similar examples that I could look at?

Thanks in advance.
John

[forskare]

RE: Design help

My questions are: is this a good approach? DON'T KNOW
Can I use Action scripting? YES
or must I code pieces of Xbasic? YES
Do you know of any similar examples that I could look at? NO

John,

I was't trying to me a 'smarty pants' but there simply isn't enough information to give the kind of answer you desire. I have 2 suggestions. 1) Solicit someone with whom you can spend some time discussing your situation in detail (perhaps a fee involved) or 2) begin creating your application, trying different approaches. When you get stuck, post a message giving sufficient detail so others can offer the solution w/0 spending a lot of time trying to understand the request.

kenn

[JerryBrightbill]

RE: Design help

John

I had to reread your question a few times, but it does seem that what you want is a lookup for the activites. This is a built in action in field rules. You could set up a lookup in the child activites table to open a list of unique activites. Lookups are covered in the Users Guide starting on about page 118.

The normal way to use a lookup is to create a separate table with all of the possible lookup values, in this case "activities". Since you already have a dedicated table for activities, this would be very easy to set up in field rules.

1. Open field rules for the child table
2. Scroll down thru the fields until you get to the field for activites
3. Click on the lookup tab
4. Select Table Lookup for lookup styles
5. Enter the table for the master list of activites
6. Select a linking field. This is the field in the lookup source table that matches the field in the current table.
7. Select a field to use to create an order (normqally the linking field)
8. Fill in values for source and fill. If the only thing you want is the activity, use the name for the activity field in both tables.
9. If you want the user to add or edit existing records, click the appropriate boxes.
10. In most cases, you would select "force closest match" on allow exceptions if you wan the user to be forced to make a selection from the list.

Saver the field rules and you are done. Now when you make any entry into the child activites field, a lookup will open to select values.

Jerry

[John Dodson]

RE: Design help

Jerry and Ken, thanks for the replies.

Yes, currently it is designed as Jerry outlines - a conventional lookup. I was trying to think of a better way to easily 'pick' a relatively large number of records. I solved that adding a field and flagging the core activites, adding an 'append core' button to the form. A conventional lookup works fine for the few remaing records that need to be added individually.

Thanks again.
John

[CALocklin]

RE: Design help

John,

You might want to take a look at the PTracker application I have on my website at www.aimsdc.net. This has Projects linked to 1:Many to Tasks which are linked 1:Many to Actions. You might get some good ideas from what I've done there.

Unfortunately, there are 2 drawbacks right now. (1) I don't give out the code because I built this to be a marketable application and (2) the current trial version has expired so you can only view existing data but not change or add anything. The current trial version was done in version 4 and the v5 update isn't completed yet.

[John Dodson]

RE: Design help

Thanks Cal, I'll take a peek!