FileMaker Relationships – How They Compare
OK, I’M TALKING ABOUT TABLE OCCURRENCE relationships here, not the other kind. Although those might get more hits…
Dwayne Wright explores the basic different types of relationships that are possible between two tables:
…there is a feature in the FileMaker define relationship dialog box, you can define what is a compatible relationship. For example, say we have a relationship between a clients table and an invoice table, the normal operator would be clients:client_id = invoices:client_id. The valid relationship would be when the data in the two fields equal.
With FileMaker 7 and higher, some of the OTHER comparison operators used in a realtionship can be …
≠ ( not equal )
> ( greater than )
< ( less than )
≥ ( greater than or equal to )
≤ ( less than or equal to )
x ( means all records in both table occurrence compare, no matter the data in either≠ ( not equal )
Combine these basic operators to build more complex relationships. For example, you might want to show all invoices greater than a certain date for a particular customer in the invoice table.
Read the whole thing to get a better understanding of FileMaker relationships.
July 4, 2014 @ 7:32 am
I’ve been told (and actually believe) that cartesian [x] and comparable [≥≤] operators are speedkillers.
To avoid cartesian, i have a indexed formulafield ‘rel_1’=1 for every table. Though a cartesian between Table A AND Table B is
TableA::rel_1 = TableB::rel1
For comparable operators, there are custom functions (Brian Dunning) for DateRange / TimeRange/NumberRange with fields “from” AND “to” which resolves the values into 1 field with carriage returns.
Example:
from= 1
to = 4
f_NumberRange =
1¶
2¶
3¶
4¶
This allows a relationship:
TableA::f_NumberRange = TableB::Number