Database Reference
In-Depth Information
▪ You can put an Expenses, Line Item, Timeslip, or even a Payments portal on the Cus-
tomers layout. For instance, you might want to see all the expenses incurred for a specif-
ic customer. And like the Invoices table, you can use calculations to sum up all those re-
lated records ( Using a Related Field in a Calculation ).
▪ You can put a GTRR button ( Using GTRR to Create a Found Set ) on the Invoice portal
so you can quickly see a found set of a Customer's invoices without performing a find.
▪ Using the principle of bidirectionality, you could put a Customers::Full Name field on a
Payment record or use a GTRR button on an Expense record to jump through hyperspace
directly to the proper Customer record.
WARNING
The options you set in the Edit Relationship window ( Figure 5-23 ) don't pass through implicit rela-
tionships, with good reason. For example, the Customers-to-Jobs relationship is set to allow the cre-
ation of related Jobs records. However, when you're on a Customer record, you can't create an In-
voice record from the Invoice portal unless you also turn on the option to create related records for
the Invoice table in the Jobs-to-Invoices relationship. If you do that, though, all Invoices you create
through the Invoices portal on the Customers layout will get the Job ID from the first record in the
Jobs table. That's probably not what you want. More likely, you'll have multiple jobs going on for at
least some of your customers, so you should create Invoices only when you're on a record in the
Jobs table. Implicit relationships have some limitations, and you should be aware of them as you're
designing.
When you're figuring out how best to add a new feature to your database, take a gander at
your Relationships graph, and trace the line between all the tables that'll be affected. Take
notice of the key fields in each table and the options set for each relationship. This simple
preparation will often help you come up with solutions faster, and with fewer oddball behavi-
ors.
You'll learn more advanced relationship techniques in Chapter 14 . But now that you've
mastered the fundamentals of relationships, you'll be switching gears to learn more about
how to make fields work.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search