Greetings. I'm pretty much a beginner at database design, though understand the basics and am willing to learn.

I need a Calendar to schedule pastors and wedding ceremonies. In other words, I send pastors to different places to perform weddings, sometimes they have several in one day and sometimes have to move from place to place. So, I need to know who is available at what time to go to a certain place to do a wedding. It appears that the Scheduling Edition is the one I need. However, I need some other capabilities:
- A list view by month that can show all weddings, weddings by place, weddings by pastor, etc.
- A way to calculate how many weddings each individual pastor will perform that month.

Can those capabilities be easily added?

Thanks for the help.

Hi,

Sounds like our Pro calendar would work for you unless you need to scan for gaps within a day... "which pastor can fit in 3 hours next Tuesday afternoon." If you have to answer questions like that, then the Scheduling Edition makes more sense. One way to get a sense of this is to download the 10 day demo of the Scheduling Edition and enter a busy week's appointments. Then look at the Day, Week, and Month views to see if you can get a good sense of what's going on. If you can't, and find yourself constantly turning to the Schedule Tab, then you know the Scheduling Edition is for you.

By the way, if you're starting a new project I'd recommend taking a look at our integrated calendar for FielMaker 8. Its a bit simpler under the hood and includes the scheduling tab along with a built in contact management component.

- A list view by month that can show all weddings, weddings by place, weddings by pastor, etc.

Well we have a list view that will show all the activities that month. The report currently summarizes by day when printed. You'd want to duplicate that layout and modify these duplicate to use different "break fields", creating reports that summarize by place, by type-and-pastor, etc. FileMaker calls these sub summary reports and if you search FileMaker's built in help for "sub summary" you'll find some explanations.

- A way to calculate how many weddings each individual pastor will perform that month.

You can add summary fields to the reports described above to count the values being summarized by your break field. So if your breaking your report by pastor, you'd have a count of the number of activities for that pastor. If after that you broke the report by appointment type (and "wedding" was one type) you'd have how many weddings for that pastor.

There are a number of other ways to do this, but these sub summary reports and their summary fields allow you to reuse minor variations on the same code (similar layouts with different break fields) to calculate a lot of different things.

Hope that helps.

Thanks very much for the help and advice. I'll download some demos and see how they work for me. I'm sure I'll be back later. Take care.