Hi group,

I have read in a few places opinions stating that with version 8 there
is no need at all for join files.

Is this true? If so, what is the way to go for typical situations like
many contacts associated with many clients, and viceversa? In FM6 and
bellow, I would have a join file to create relationships between
contacts and clients, avoiding the need to duplicate contact records
and related info.

How can this be done in version 8 (or 7, by the way) without the join
file? Is it advantageous compared to the "old" style?

Thanks,

Carlos

In my view, it is still a part of good ralational database design to use
join tables. Am I wrong?

In article <1h3lier.w4ryoy4dl6yoN%no (AT) way (DOT) dk>,
no (AT) way (DOT) dk (Jens Rasmussen) wrote:

For a many-to-many relationship you need an intermediate Join table. For
a one-to many relationship you do not.

This is simply based on the logic of the situation.

In FMP 7/8, you can take data from any table occurrence that is
"donwstream" in a relationship diagram, so you do not need intermediate
calculations or lookups the way you did in FMP 6 and earlier.

Bill Collins

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For email, remove invalid.

In article <7jsij15bj4jc0hdkf3sr31bps1pgkgrip3 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com>,
carlosp (AT) nnhotmail (DOT) com says...
You still require join *tables*. You no longer require join files. As
you can put multiple tables in a single file.

And as someone else commented you can now directly plumb more than on
relationship deep through the relationship hierarchy without fiddling
with intermediate fields or calculated results.

Not wrong! The best way to handle many-to-many relationship is
definitely to have a cross-reference or join table.

I had to support a Filemaker 5.5 database once that was set up with 1
file that had 100 internal relationships. Yeah, it worked...but what a
pain. IMHO, using the relationship graph to replace good design is
going down the same path.

-Scott in SoCal

Thank you all for your replies. They have helped me to clear an
important doubt prior to starting to develop in version 7/8.

Regards,

Carlos

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:53:36 GMT, 42 <nospam (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote: