Hello,
I'm so happy that I found what looks to be a helpful and knowledgeable
group of people. I'm new to Filemaker and have been beating my head
on the wall for the last week trying to build a database for a project
at work. I'm an archivist, and we are digitizing a collection of
documents to put online. These documents are pretty recent and
virtually everything in the collection is subject to copyright. So,
lucky me, we get to document each item so that we can track down the
copyright holders and try to secure rights. What I need is this. To
record information about the document, the author, and the publisher.
I've set up my tables as follows:

ITEM table:
itemID (the unique id-this is the scanned barcode; the primary key)
itemLabel (the type of item, selected from a list---like is it a
correspondence, journal article, etc)
itemDate
itemRightsStatus-copyright status
itemRightsNotes
itemRightsAccess-whether we've gotten permissions or not
itemModifiedDate
itemModifiedby
permSoughtDate

Author Table
authorID (this is assigned by filemaker, a unique serial number; the
primary key)
authorName
authorAddress
authorPhone
authorEmail

Publisher Table
all the same as the author table except for publisher

author_item (this is a joining table)
authorID
itemID

publisher_item (another joining table)
publisherID
itemID

I've managed to set up the relationships just fine. Where I'm having
problems is in setting up the interface so that we can easily enter
the data. I'd like for us to create the publisher and or author
record, go to the items page and enter in all the info about the item,
with the ability to add authors and publishers. I can even do that,
but the catch is that I can't delete names from the item (if I do, it
simply erases that field from the related files). What should happen
is that the record in the join table is deleted. I know that probably
requires some script, but I have no idea how to write that. I know
that the type of functionality I'm after is probably quite common, but
I'm unable to find examples of these little data entry problems I'm
encountering. Can anyone point me to an example online of what I am
asking for??? Would anyone be willing to have a peek at my file to
lend a helping hand?