John

The post by Richard gave excellent advice as to the table structure you need. But as you have quite clearly seen, he didn't talk about how to create an interface – such as for the creation or linking of your records.

There's good reason for this. Though the structure itself is fairly easy to define, interface depends on usage, personal preference, and many other factors.

You suggest that your users will begin with a customer record. That means the script should grab that customer's ID and then have the user pick a vehicle to work with. If there are ten or twenty vehicles in the database, then a popup menu would do. If not, some other vehicle 'picker' would be needed. Obviously this picker system is an important part of the interface.

So the script would collect the zkp_customerID value from the current customer record, have the user choose a vehicle (and thereby pick up the zkp_vehicleID), then create a new join table record using these two IDs and the current date. Another need in the script, of course, would be to find any other 'open' join record for the selected vehicle (ie one without an end date) and fill in that end date.

One could imagine, on the contrary, that the interface could operate in a vehicle-centered way (ie initiated from a vehicle record) then you would want to script this the other way around – start from a vehicle record and have the user pick a customer to become the new owner.

I hope that helps a little. If you need ideas for picking vehicles or customers from the database, just post on that subject – I know there are lots of great ideas out there.

Steve



On 16 Nov 2010, at 04:36, John Raid wrote:

> I have some problems to 'see' how to implement the creation of records.
> 
> Right now it starts in the Contact table.
> The scripts sets the needed keys in a variable (formal global), goes to the
> vehicle table, creates a new record and set the zkf_customerID.
> The address fields are related fields based on the customerID.
> (or would look ups be better?).
> 
> If I put a join table in the middle, I can not link the customer to the
> vehicle in one move.
> So, a button on the vehicle layout should cover that.
> 
> That would be for the first 'owner'.
> A date field and a 'new owner' field on the vehicle layout, with a re-assign
> button should cover the switch in owners by creating a new record in the
> join table with dateStart and ID of new owner, while the dateStart should be
> set in the dateEnd record of the 'previous' user.
> 
> I'm I close or is there a less complicated method.
> 
> I'm open for suggestion, willing to learn, because now I know enough from FM
> to be dangerous.