Summarizing Children

[johngtatp]

Theory Question.

I am trying to figure a way to accomplish this.

The Dream:
One record shows an aircraft departure time date.

Create a one to many link to have multiple services like fuel, rental cars, hotel reservations be the children.

I would like to have an icon for each of these and display them in a browse field when looking at the departure record so one can see in a glance all the services attached to that departure.

It would really be great to change the icon whether or not a status flag in the child record has been checked to easily see if the task was completed.

Other than showing each child record, I was trying to make an easy summary.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

[MoGrace]

Re: Summarizing Children

Hi John,
What exactly would you like to see in this summary - can you produce it on a spreadsheet or something else you can show us?

[johngtatp]

Re: Summarizing Children

In essence something like what is depicted. The challenge is there can be an unlimited number of services for each arrival and departure so I did not want to hard code a spot for each in the parent record.

I would like a way to vizualize instantly whether all of the items have been complete. It does not have to be icons, it could be words, but color or something to show easily that the item is not complete without having to click on each parent record to see the detail. I suppose I could have just one flag on the parent to tell if any of the items were not completed, but just thought it is a challenge or if anyone else has an idea.

[MoGrace]

Re: Summarizing Children

I am trying to think in terms of first things first. You mentioned that you want to keep a schedule up of all the day's activities (arrivals and departures) that would be refreshed as reservations were added. With that list you can sort the browse by time or reservation number by clicking on a column title. From this form you can add new reservations. Then you want to enter services related to either an arrival or a departure and this you can do by zooming to the reservation from the schedule to add them. Am I even close yet? Since your services are also related by type A or D to the RES_DETAIL, you can group them accordingly to display like you showed. What that would entail is an auto increment field that assigns a unique ID to each RES_DETAIL arrival or departure so these services can be linked by that key field.

The set for the Schedule would be:

DUMMY
===>RES_DETAILS [KEY: DATE]
    |--->RESERVATIONS [KEY: RES_NO]
         |--->TAILNUM

Then the set for the services would be:

RESERVATIONS
--->TAILNUM [KEY: TAILNUM]
===>RES_DETAILS [KEY: RES_NO]
    |===>A_SERVICES [KEY: TYPE+RES_ID]
    |===>D_SERVICES [KEY: TYPE+RES_ID

Which if you can get the alias to work, could also be the same table.

[MoGrace]

Re: Summarizing Children

Edit: Well the theory is a good one - if it worked! ;) What happens with using an alias of the same table is that the 2nd instance errs as being open when you try to create the form - or even display the default. An alternative would be to add the RES_NO to the services table and link it to the parent, then 2 filtered browses could display the related data. Otherwise linking to RES_DETAIL will only show the browse related to the detail item selected and the other will appear blank. I'm still working on it...Using a link of 1=1 might work if you can filter the records in services to only show the records related to res_detail.

Edit: Nope ain't gonna work. The alias continues to err as an open table. Back to the help...

[MoGrace]

Re: Summarizing Children

Ok, I got the alias to work so it would show two browses on the form using one table twice. The key was to filter the form for each linked alias - not the tables defined in the set. When the form is maximized the two browses show more records. If these are repeat customers (very likely), it might be good to define a 'rule' table for each customer's preferences so you can load the services & fees they usually require automatically. Then you can have different charges for similar default items based on each customer - as well as default notes for those services that are particular to each.

[johngtatp]

Re: Summarizing Children

Robin,

This is the idea, looks exactly where I want to go with it. The kicker is can you summarize on the schedule view the icons or text or something in say a calculated field?

What I mean is, I would like to look at the schedule/status view, not the detail, and be able to see what services have been selected for that arrival/departure. The real idea is to have some way to indicate whether that item has been completed or not; so in a glance, one can look at the status board and see clearly if we were ready for all the arrivals without having to drill down on each item. I have been racking my brain for a way to do this. I did something like this in a report once, but never in a browse.

Thank you so much for your help so far.