On 12 Jun 2011, at 03:16, Andy Gordon wrote:

> We are doing something wrong or missing a step.  We use a server with the FMP server version.  This impasse is most frustrating and time consuming.  We wondered if there are re-naming conventions we don't know about that may part of the problem.  Any assistance most appreciated.
> 

Andy

I'm coming back to this a little late; my excuse was a rare holiday of a couple of weeks.

I don't think your problem is in naming or re-naming conventions. Rather, I think your problem is twofold.

First, I think you haven't got fully to grips with the concept of tables and table occurrences in .fp7 files. Things are very different from the FMP6 days of one file equals one table. One important point, which I think has already been made, is that file references (ie references to external files used, for example, in relationships) are now much more explicit. This has a number of knock-on effects that, combined with what appears to be a somewhat unconventional data model, may mean behaviour is not as expected.

Second, it is possible that some part of your FMP6 process/model (which I don't really understand) uses a quirk of FMP6 behaviour that has not carried over to .fp7. You have mentioned a couple of times some kind of multiple lookup (where you seem to somehow be looking up from more than one file into a single field depending on the match value), but this must be a trick that I do not recall from FMP6 days... It sounds a bit unlikely to me. But without understanding exactly what your FMP6 files are doing, it is not going to be easy to help you.

All in all, I think you may be barking up the wrong tree. Given the immense power of FMP11, it is almost certain that you should be looking to abandon your system of replicating files every year. There really is no need to do that, when you can simply include a 'year' field in every table to indicate which year a transaction takes place. Your time would almost certainly be better spent developing yourself a modern database structure than trying to replicate something that may use a quirk of FMP6 behaviour.

But that's just my opinion...

Good luck. Do ask again if you get stuck further down the line.

Steve