Hi Charles,
Although there may be good reasons
for this, have you carefully thought through the purpose of having so
many fields carry through to the child panel? If it is because the
unique index (Primary Key) on the parent panel carries many fields to
uniquely identify the record then you should perhaps consider using a
non-data loaded unique field as the unique identifier, such as an
incrementing number field (or Ralph's "Moment" identifier); then the
child panel only needs one field to bind it to the parent, and the data
from the panel is always accessible through the link for either
reporting or other calculation purposes.
Of course there can be good reasons
to bring multiple fields through a panel link, but from what you are
saying it does sound a little excessive, and will mean that there
isprobably lots of data reducancy in the database.
For instance you might have a
contact register where you have an address book. It might initially
seem fine to have the First and Last Name as the Primary Key, but then
later you find duplicates and so you add, date of birth, or phone
number or address fields to make the index unique. But say you later
add a contact register panel your child panel needs to have each of
those field making up the Primary Key, plus whatever data is coming
duplicated in the Child record. By replacing the data loaded Primary
Key fields with say one unique autonumber field, only one field is
needed in link field to the child panel. Apart from the redundancy
issue if any of the data in a parent's Primary Key field change you
have an issue of needing to cascade the data change into the child
panel. For these reasons I always try to have a non-data loaded field
as the unique identifier for a record.
Sometimes you want to pull "default"
values from a parent into a child, and the link fields can help you
accomplish that, but in many cases (but not all) they too can be
condensed back into a single identifier and using field formulas on
Create to pull through defaults.
I think you have not so much hit a
limit with the capabilities of DP, but more that there is some work to
be done on the application design. I do not think other database
products would make your problem go away.
Regards
Brian
----- Original Message -----
Sent:
Monday, April 28, 2008 5:55 AM
Subject:
Re: [Dataperf] Re: Panel Link Question
Hi Ralph,
I thought so too, but I added up the field lengths and they only come
to 192, including the fields with won't carry through the link.
In the meantime, I think I've discovered I'm doing something wrong in
designing the link. (It's been years since I've done any more than
superficial design work). After creating the child record through the
link (manually filling in the values not carried through the link),
upon returning to the parent record and trying to view the related
record, the link doesn't know it exists. Very strange! I know I'm
doing something wrong, but can't put my finger on it.
Charlie
Ralph Alvy wrote:
There's a limit in terms of amount of data, not in terms of number of
fields. Sounds like you're passing that limit.
Charles G. Wolf wrote:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<font face="Times New Roman">Hi Everybody,<br>
<br>
Is there a limit on the number of fields that can be carried from a
parent panel to a child panel via a panel link? Fields 1-6 in the
Link Key Field List come through fine, but 7-10 do not. The index
selection matches the first 10 fields exactly, and in order. There
are 12 fields total in the index.<br>
<br>
I've been looking through all the documention I have, including Ralph's
book, but I can't locate the source of my problem.<br>
<br>
Thanks.<br>
Charlie Wolf<br>
</font>
</body>
</html>
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